Fashionable history: how the heels appeared.
Posted on April 1, 2009
Filed Under Boots, Interesting to know, Pumps
Shoes, that make an owner look higher, have been widely known since the times of the Ancient Greece. At that times such shoes were used in theater performances and resembled wooden or cork sandals with an elevated sole. In medieval Europe city streets were covered in sewage, and people had to put on stilt shoes – wooden soles with leather belts. They were put over average everyday shoes and called sabots. In the East shoes like that, named cabab were put on in the bathhouses for the visitors not to burn their feet on the hot floor. In Venice, starting from the XV century, women of different social statuses used to wear high platform shoes (up to 20 cm), that were called cokkolli – meaning “little hooves”.
High-heeled shoes had for a long time been worn only by men – women came to this fashion only in the XVII century. In women’s fashion some practical functions of a heel were replaced by pure esthetical. These shoes made a woman’s posture look grand, though at that times wearing high heels was connected with hard physical work, for the height of heels sometimes amounted to 20 cm.
Heels of the shoes were usually painted in different colours in accordance to fashion and season: blue, green, black. Red was a very important colour, for in the European countries it served as a symbol of aristocracy. In XVII the heels of the boots were painted black, and the red colour remained only by shoes (Mr. Red Heels was the nickname for French fops in the times of Louis XIV). Before the French revolution of the XVIII century only the court nobleman were allowed to wear shoes with high heels, painted red.
The history of heels continues developing. Thus, in the beginning of XVIII century the French invented the so-called “dove-leg” heel. Being concaved upward, it created an optical illusion of a foot being smaller, than it is. Famous stiletto heels were created in the XX century, and, unfortunately, the name of their creator is unknown.
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Everyone knows the Egyptians invented high heels. There are pictures of them in the Pyramids wearing high heels, much before the Greeks, so i dont know about this article.