If the Shoe Fits...

One of my earliest memories is throwing a sandal out the window of a moving car. I didn't like wearing shoes and the car window was open. Imagine my mother's frustration when we arrived at our destination. My relationship with shoes has had its ups and downs-marred by violent acts on both our parts from that first shoe incident until the present. Shoes causing blisters, heel spurs and corns are met with immediate disposal or banishment to the highest reaches of my closet. Shoes throughout history have had good and bad times. Now is a particularly glorious time for shoes in terms of style, comfort and inclusiveness.

It's difficult to get details on shoe styling from cave paintings, but footwear found with early human remains shows pieces of wood or leather tied up around the foot with animal entrails or ties made from rush or other grasses. Leather was wrapped around the feet and legs of those who found themselves in colder climates and became prototypes of moccasins and boots. These foot coverings were all about comfort, protection and survival.

It didn't take long for style and pride to overcome the functional aspects of footwear, and those who had soon sported different shoes than those who had not. People with resources wore shoes for show and prestige. Ancient Egyptians with power and means wore sandals with long curved tips that served no purpose except to prove two things: they didn't have to walk to work and they knew the coolest shoemakers. Slaves and other day laborers went barefoot or wore woven or animal skin sandals.

Through the centuries, shoes got longer and more pointed; wider and slashed, higher and more dangerous. Often the church stepped in as with the Poulaine in the Middle Ages when shoes grew so pointed and phallic that they were banned, and later shoes got so wide with the duckbill shoe that laws finally had to limit the width to five and a half inches across. Women in the fifteenth century wore Chopines, at first intended to get their dainty silk-clad feet up out of the muck, but eventually raised to such heights for the sake of fashion that a cane or human support was required.

Women wore heels as high as six inches in the court of Louis XIV. Their men, not to be outdone, mimicked the king's favorite style of shoes with red heels and soles. The French Revolution brought folks down to earth as high heels had little to do with égalité. Shoes were lower and probably more comfortable than they'd been in a while. That didn't last long and soon, by the middle of the eighteenth century, shoes were higher and more painful than ever. A trend for small, refined feet caused some women to remove their baby toes, and almost everyone to wear shoes a size or two smaller than they needed.

Actually women today are removing toes to fit into shoes; red soles on shoes are available today, thanks to Christian Louboutin;  Chopines are really just platforms with attitude; duckbills looked a lot like Earth shoes; and gladiator sandals-who doesn't have a pair of those? The only major, historic trend in footwear not available within our lifetime would be shoes with exaggerated, curved pointy toes, and who knows, that may happen yet.