As a college student, I used pictures of shoes multiple times to complete picture assignments. Once I pictured a coed walking home from class under an umbrella barefoot in a pouring rain. It appeared she was attempting to preserve her shoes by keeping them out of water but the candid picture looked as if water was running off the umbrella and into her shoes. I didn’t verify the situation but I suspect she was in for a wet surprise when she reached her destination.
Another time I watch a coed slip her shoes off and leave them in what appeared to be a dry space while she joined friend in playing basketball on a combinatin tennis court, basketball court and ice skating rink. It was raining at the time and when she finished playing and went to leave the dry area where she left her shoes had flooded and she had to drain the water from her shoes.
As part of a promotion for ag college’s Little Amercian Royal, I was asked to take promotion pictures. The student council officer who asked me enlisted the cooperation of his sister. On picture day, his fashionably attired system came to pose with a stubborn Holstein. It was in the spring of the year and the lots were muddy. We were just getting started taking pictures when the cow decided to visit a particularly muddy area of the lot. The farm girl was determined the cow would not get her way but I suspect the coed’s shoes were ruined.
This week, I devoted much of my weekend time to preparing a presentation scheduled for the developers’ meeting held yesterday (Wednesday) at the Superior Library. Monday afternoon I was searching for a topic for this column and feeling desperate when I came across an email from History Facts about the early history of shoes. Hopefully, you will find the following interesting as I drew much of the information from History Facts email.
Footwear is so integral to the human experience, it’s hard to imagine a time in history when it didn’t exist. To be without shoes in modern life would pose a significant problem — can you imagine leaving your home and walking to work barefoot through a sticker patch? I have a friend who tells about trying to accompany friends on a jaunt to a nearby pond for a midnight swim. The outing didn’t end well when she stepped on a cactus plant. Forty years later she still has scars on her foot.
The degree to which footwear is essential for enhanced mobility means footwear could be considered our first vehicle. Whether you’re a bona fide shoe-lover or someone who takes footwear for granted, it’s worth thinking about the lineage of these things we put on our feet to carry ourselves through the world. Let’s go on a quick walkabout to explore the history of footwear.
Anthropologists estimate that humans first began wearing some form of sturdy foot covering at least 40,000 years ago, based on changes in toe bones. The oldest surviving pair of shoes is what’s referred to as the Fort Rock sandals. They were woven sagebrush bark sandals made in what’s now southeast Oregon and northern Nevada about 10,200 to 9,300 years ago. Similar variants of these sandals were made by the Klamath Tribes up until the 20th century.
I remember the days before steel-belted radial tires when it was popular to make sandals from worn-out automobile tires.
As a youngster, I dreamed of making my own Indian-style moccasins and learning to walk like an Indian.
As for fully enclosed shoes, archaeologists made a surprising discovery during a 2010 dig in an Armenian cave: well-preserved shoes made from tanned cowhide that date back 5,500 years. In other words, the world’s oldest leather shoes. Aside from being made of a familiar modern material, the shoes were also laced along a center seam. Renowned designer Manolo Blahnik commented, “It is astonishing how much this shoe resembles a modern shoe!”
Throughout antiquity, footwear refinements were made as new materials were harvested and traded. Sandals that adorned the feet of Egyptian royalty were sleek and look strikingly like flip-flop prequels, as do Japanese quilted hemp sandals. Roman sandals were made lighter with cork soles and may have been the first footwear built in accordance with the shape of the foot and toes, as well as the first that differentiated between right and left.
When I was a college student, I bought two pair synthetic leather shoes. They were very uncomfortable but they withstood repeated soakings on wet walks to and from class.
By the year 1305, King Edward I’s decree that an inch should equate to three dried barleycorns became the basis for English shoe sizing. That reference standard soon became relevant beyond the size of the whole shoe, as a fashion craze for shoes with exaggeratedly long points gripped 14th-century Europe. Known as poulaines, or crakows, the shoes were a status symbol in the truest sense; the impracticality of the design Medieval-Europeans’ obsession with pointy shoes caused painful bunions. The longer the poulaine, the more prosperity the shoe conveyed as the wearers were limited in the work they could do. Perhaps not surprisingly, poulaines also came to be considered racy, and clergymen disdained them as “claws of devils.”
By 1463, English King Edward IV passed a sumptuary law limiting toe length to 2 inches (or, six dried barleycorns). This law, combined with the changing tides of fashion, caused late-15th-century shoe style preferences to veer toward a wide-toe shoe (and yes, eventually the width of the shoe was restricted, too. But even as shoe designs changed, a link between footwear and status remained.
Reader Comments(0)