By Riello, Giorgio; McNeil, Peter
Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil find shoes a fascinating key to social mores, and discuss what choice and design of footwear can tell us about morality, mobility and sexuality in Europe over the centuries.
SHOES, LIKE OTHER OBJECTS, can illuminate specific aspects of the past. Through their survival, and material appearance - their texture, weight and design, they can convey abstract historical concepts, and also by their human associations and suggestions of physicality. For example, consider the images of the piles of shoes belonging to the millions of Jews killed in concentration camps. How powerfully the humble mismatched shoes stand for the presence of persons whose dignity and humanity have been erased. But a shoe produced and worn at a specific time also embodies the values, ideals and aesthetic choices of an era. Shoes can tell us a lot about an individual, but they also convey messages that are understood across society: high heels stand for an exaggerated femininity; red shoes for pleasure and desire; and sneakers for modern pace in the city, leisure and relaxation. The story of shoes in the longue dure is characterized by themes of morality, mobility and extremism as we shall see.
The shape, colours and design of footwear has always been influenced by the difference between the genders, and in turn the desires, ambitions and sensual signals of men and women. Even if the foot is the least gendered part of the body, men’s shoes are still immediately recognizable from women’s. This is not because of functional dissimilarities or anatomical diversities between the sexes, but because shoes are one way by which we construct gender identity. Shoes can tell us a lot about the place of a man or a woman within society and the physical space that they inhabit. But as the roles of the two sexes have changed over time, so have shoes and their use in highlighting distinctions and divisions in society.
Costume historians have noted that from the fourteenth century men and women’s dress began to look substantially different. In this period, the tunic-like shapes of early medieval clothes previously worn by both genders gave way to different aesthetic forms of the clothed body for men and women. Men started wearing hose, revealing the shape of their legs and the size of their calves and underlying their virility. In contrast, women started wearing long skirts entirely covering their legs and feet. This ‘great gender distinction’ in attire was accompanied by, and to a great deal influenced, the emergence of fashion in Europe. Both sexes started using their clothes as indicators of social status. One’s position in society no longer depended on birth, but on the way one looked. And as new money from trade and banking allowed for increased expenditure on clothing, a rich merchant’s wife could look as magnificent as a princess.
The use of clothing to express aspirations, to look smart, and gain acceptance among particular social groups seems a perfectly innocent practice today. However this was not the case in the Middle Ages when both church and state were actively interested in preserving distinctions and divisions within society. This was done through the sumptuary laws - laws that established who was entitled to wear what. If a noble lady could wear gold trimmings, the wife of a merchant would rank lower in material expectations and could wear only silver trimmings. The wife of an artisan could not expect to wear any trimmings at all.
However, this was a vision of a static society that was more an idea than a reality. Historians are not sure how widespread the enforcement of sumptuary laws was and how frequently they were challenged. One of the items of apparel that was most discussed (and banned) in sumptuary laws across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a type of footwear, worn mostly by women but sometimes also by men, known as pianetta. Flanelle varied considerably in size, but were characterized by thick soles which could be up to twenty inches high. Few examples survive but they are frequently to be seen in frescoes, paintings and prints, suggesting their widespread use.
Pianelle became popular as a way of protecting ladies’ feet and their precious gowns from the filthy streets of medieval Europe. They were made mostly of cork and sometimes of light wood to allow maximum mobility and were covered in soft, often light-coloured leather. It has been suggested by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli that pianette derived from ‘kub-kabs’ or nalins, wooden ‘clogs’ made with a bridge-type structure, worn in Turkey and Syria (at the same time), which were also well known in Venice. Similar footwear is to be found in India and Japan, but here their use was less for practical reasons than to express a ceremonial transformation in a bounded space such as a wedding or to indicate the borders of social and psychological ‘pollution’.
In fact, in spite of their construction the idea that pianelle enabled women to venture out into the streets of a medieval city is incorrect. These were expensive shoes that prevented women from engaging in practical or manual activities. The lack of mobility was considered a positive, rather than a negative, attribute. Those who could afford it, would have chosen to wear pianelle. As in the case of footbinding in Imperial China, a woman incapable of moving freely was a sign of her husband’s status and wealth. She was a spouse with no manual responsibilities.
But as with footbinding, pianelle contained a second layer of meaning. Their lack of functionality was also a sign of their erotic value. An association between sexuality and shoes can be traced back to Ancient Greece at least, and several European languages retain colourful idioms of relating sex and shoes. In medieval and Early Modern Sicily, for instance, prostitutes were obliged to wear clogs called tappini from which stems the Italian colloquial verb tappinare, meaning a sexual act performed by a prostitute. Similarly the term zoccola (a feminine form of the word zoccolo, meaning ‘clog’) is still used in modern Italian as slang for ‘prostitute’.
Pianette, more than any other type of shoe, were considered erotic in a way that displeased the defenders of morality. Their wearers were accused of being ungodly and dishonest. Preachers observed how the Gospel of Matthew said that no person should alter his or her physical stature. This was against God. As Tertullian in his De Cultu Feminarum (’The Ornaments of Women’) had explained in the third century AD, to increase one’s stature was not just a contravention of God’s creation but also a deception, as one’s physical shape, size and proportions were hidden from the judgement of suitors. Some shoes were even decried for making the toes extended, like the claws of base animals.
Pianelle had such a large area for possible decoration that this also made them the perfect example of the wrong type of ‘vanity’. Embroideries and warm colours were morally unacceptable. The fourteenth-century Catalan Franciscan preacher Frances Eiximenis condemned shoes such as pianelle worn to attract the interest of passers-by. Both the height and the unbalance caused by the front rise in the shoe, provided, according to Baldassar Castiglione, ‘grandissima gratia’ (’very much grace’) to the posture and walk. The foot itself and the leg were mostly hidden behind long skirts, although in The Courtier (1528), Castiglione advised ladies to use the pianelle with discretion to ’show with some womanly disposition a little bit of leg, covered by a graceful and tight stocking’.
In the fifteenth century, under religious pressure and with the aim of curbing conspicuous expenditure, the legislators of many Italian cities decided to use the law to obstruct or ban women from indulging in high-heeled shoes. In 1401, for instance, the legislators of Bologna forbade the use of painted, carved, or embroidered pianelle or shoes with toes longer than 0.7 inches. Those who did not comply were fined and their footwear confiscated. Notwithstanding these impositions, the height and beauty of pianelle continued to increase over the following centuries. Romagnolo Tommaso Garzoni, writing in the late sixteenth-century, described ‘Venetian ladies… transformed into giants’, who according to John Evelyn (1620-1706) ’stood so tall that they had to set their hands on the heads of two matron-like servants or old women to support them’.
If the moral laxity associated with pianelle was contenuous, the fact that they prevented women from moving freely was welcomed in some quarters. An old Venetian senator is supposed to have argued in the seventeenth-century that the height of pianette had to be increased rather than decreased by law, otherwise wives and daughters ‘would go to all the parties and scorn their houses and such bad government would ruin the family’.
The act of walking, and the benefits of limited mobility continued to be the subject of debate in the ensuing centuries. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the poor condition of the streets precluded ‘walking for pleasure’ beyond private parks or pleasure gardens. Streets were dirty, there were few pavements, rubbish was everywhere and, in places like Britain, inclement weather didn’t help. But for the better off, walking was a \risky business in other ways. The street, more than anywhere, was the place where the fragility of a hierarchical system based on social separation was most apparent. The mob, the world of vagrants, the poor and the underworld of petty criminality had to be kept at a distance.
As towns grew, they became internally differentiated both in terms of urban facilities and of social clusters. Fences, walls and the privatization of streets and squares were the outcome of spatial segregation. Space was increasingly ‘appropriated’ and safeguarded. Physical safety was regulated by proprietary rights and often backed by financial investment and by significant policing efforts. Rank implied the respect for behavioural rules that were particularly strict. As a workman had no place in a fancy London shop, so a gentleman was not welcome in an East End inn. Inequality in the use of space was legitimized by a clear sense of social hierarchy. At the Palais Royale in Paris, for instance, in the later part of the eighteenth century, guards stopped people who were not considered respectable enough to gain access.
In venturing outdoors women still used a variety of devices to keep themselves above ground level. The Renaissance pianella inspiration, evolved into a practical device to be attached to the shoe, rather than being part of the shoe itself. Henri Misson, in his Memoirs and Observations (1698) noticed how
… the streets of London are so dirty that the women are forc’d to raise themselves upon Pattens, or Galoshes of Iron to keep themselves out of the dirt and wet.
Their use was still widespread in the 1770s when Pierre Jean Grosley said that ‘All the women that walk the streets of London, wear these pattens, which make an odd sort of rattling’. The terrible state of roads created a metropolitan underworld of shoeblacks and ‘crossing sweepers’. These often feature in prints of eighteenth-century urban life, normally paired with either a fashionable woman or a fop shod in delicate slipper-like shoes. Much of the visual joke relates to the degradation of an occupation on the ground, near the filth all the time, cleaning those devices designed to keep others above it.
Distance from filth was an important physical requirement in an age where keeping oneself clean was not easy even for the upper echelons of society. High heels assisted in this. We are now used to the idea of high heels or slender stilettos as feminine ‘weapons of seduction’, but in the eighteenth century the high heel was a sign of power rather than sexuality. Like the pianette, the high heel also constrained mobility. It was worn both by men and women, but only those who could afford not to engage in any manual activity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, those whose physical labour constituted their only source of income had to be able to move freely to carry out their daily activities. Their use of low heels, rounded toes and strong leather uppers were unmistakable signs of their inferior social position.
The high heel commanded an enhanced physical bearing that also had to match the social stature or rank of the wearer. The relationship between high heels and social rank had its maximum expression in the famous red heels of Louis XIV. Protocol established that only the King and his court could wear red heels in France. By the mid-eighteenth century, red heels were increasingly fashionable in Britain. Charles Fox popularized them in the 1770s by wearing them with a blue hair-powder wig. But Fox was simply radicalizing a passion for high heels that had reached its peak during the reign of George II (r. 1727-60). In the 1740s Frederick, Prince of Wales, had shoes with heels 2 inches high. In the 1780s heels were still so high that ladies had to use walking sticks. The Comte de Vaublanc wrote in his Memoirs (1786) that ‘without this effort of shifting the weight of her body backward, the doll would have fallen on her feet’. In the 1820s the Nouvelle Encyclopdie des Arts et Mtiers commented sarcastically that high heels seemed to be invented ‘for protecting ladies from the inconvenience of leaving their houses’.
By this date high heels had been out of fashion for at least a generation. One of the reasons for their demise was the construction of spaces where pedestrians could easily walk. Pavements began to be built in London in the 1750s. When in 1786 the German writer Sophie Von La Roche visited the city, she observed
How happy the pedestrian on these roads, which alongside the houses are paved with large, clean paving-stones some feet wide, where many thousands of neatly clad people, eminent men, dressy women, pursue their way safe from the carriages, horses and dirt.
By the first decade of the nineteenth century pavements had appeared in several parts of Europe. The American traveller John Griscom noticed how walking was a pleasant activity even in provincial centres like Manchester.
Aesthetics are also a factor to be considered in the study of shoes. In a period excited by Neo-classical taste, flat ’slipper’- like shoes with ties around the ankle, often in glossy satin, were a fashionable choice to make women’s dress appear more Classical in parts of Europe where sandals were inappropriate for the weather. The improvement of the urban fabric was surely a factor in the spread of the new ‘Greek’ fashion. Women now wore shoes that were, according to Prince Pckler-Muskau, ‘as light as paper’, accompanied by galoshes, instead of the impractical patterns. Even Queen Victoria bowed to the latest fashion: her wedding shoes worn at her marriage in February 1840 were a pair of flat ballerina-like satin slippers.
The development of specialized shoe-makers for either men’s or women’s shoes in the early modern period points to the significance of gender in framing shoe history. Around the time that ladies started wearing shoes ‘as light as paper’, men decided that the boot was a more appropriate type of footwear for them. This was a radical shift. Half a century earlier, in 1748, when the Swedish traveller Pehr Kalm visited Britain, he observed that an Englishman did not use boots in any situation ‘except when he was riding and sitting on a horse’. Although sturdy and practical for bad weather, boots were not considered gentleman’s proper attire. The ‘Tottenham top boot’ derives its name from the Irish MP Charles Tottenham who in 1731 was heavily fined for wearing top boots in the Houses of Parliament. In Britain and in many other parts of continental Europe, the wearing of boots was considered alien to any notion of ‘gentility’, one of the key virtues of a gentleman.
The French Revolution and the following Napoleonic wars had a decisive role on masculine footwear and entirely altered social attitudes. Boot-wearing was both legitimized and fostered by war, beginning with the introduction of the Hessian boot in 1789. Men in boots seemed to be participating in the general mobilization of the nation. Boots became a sign of involvement in public affairs and democracy: by the end of the eighteenth century boots were worn for all occasions.
Nineteenth-century military campaigns in the Crimea and many parts of the expanding British Empire further reshaped the image of boots. Their widespread use in urban settings was increasingly connected to belligerent values adopted by men of all ages and classes. The association between Lord Wellington (whose polished neat Blcher boots became known as Wellingtons) as the head of the army and his bravura on the military field was well captured in an 1826 caricature showing him as the ‘Head of the Army’ in which his very persona becomes his boot. The boot became synonymous with order, manly attitude and rejection of comfort and decoration appropriate to army life.
The boot provided not just a firm elongated calf, but also a particular posture and gait. In his Thorie de la demarche (Theory of Walking), Honor de Balzac observed how
Military men have an instantly recognizable gait. Almost all of them are firmly planted on their lower backs like a bust on a pedestal; their legs bustle about under their abdomen…
Marching transformed the act of walking into a military art. The sound of boots provided the harmony for military music: 75 steps per minutes as ‘adagio , 120 for ‘andante’ and up to 300 for ‘forte and ‘fortissimo’.
But beyond the polished veneer of boots, longstanding social divisions remained. Infantrymen and other privates wore ankle Blcher boots made of sturdy leather. The soldier’s ankle boot resembled the low-cut labourer’s wooden-soled clog or hob-nailed boot, while the officer’s knee-length Hessian and Wellington, unsuitable for walking, advertised its equestrian origins. But it was not just the shape that identified different types of wearers. Officers’ boots were crafted by the best bootmakers in England or France. The celebrity of George Hoby, Wellington’s bootmaker, was second to none.
Ordinary soldiers wore boots produced in standard sizes by sweated shoemakers in metropolitan garrets and sold by contractors to the army in bulk. These clunky boots were the source of endless pain for generations of soldiers. Newspapers periodically reported British soldiers’ sufferings in this respect. When in 1813 British troops returned to Portsmouth from fighting at Corunna in Spain, people were shocked to see that soldiers ‘dragged themselves along the quay on lacerated, festering, rag-bandaged feet’. During the Crimean War ill-adapted footwear contributed to many injuries and deaths. The health of soldiers’ feet was central to war.
As nineteenth-century men affirmed their right to move freely, and their ability to dominate domestic and imperial spaces, middle and upper-class women were culturally and socially relegated to a subordinate position. Their shoes could communicate little about their social position. Women’s feet were almost totally out of sight, under long gowns and encased in \patent-leather footwear bottoned-up over the ankle.
By the early twentieth century, women’s presence in the public arena was becoming more obvious. They demanded political rights and used the street to assert their message. Dressed stylishly, they pounded the pavement in heeled button-boots, or enjoyed tennis in feminine high-heeled sports-shoes. Their shoes rejected arguments that the Vote would defeminize women. For the suffragettes, heels were a confirmation of their femininity in a man’s world of politics. The achievement of the female franchise in 1918 saw the birth of the ‘New Woman’ stripped of Victorian paraphernalia and layers of fabric. In this transformation the woman’s foot was both discovered and uncovered. The shoe entered a new centre-stage of erotic display connected to long legs, and new fashionable pleasures of mixing footwear with ensembles of skirts and dresses.
The 1920s was a time of recodification of the meaning of shoes. If ladies could walk around revealing their toenails, society was not comfortable with all of these new ‘fashions’. Masculine identity seemed to be under threat and men’s shoes once again became a contested area for gender definition. In Britain in the interwar period suede shoes became an indicator of ‘inverts’ (as homosexuals were called). Terence Greenbridge in his 1930 book Degenerate Oxford? lamented that Oxford students conformed to two types: the athlete and the aesthete, observing:
Oxford Romanticism is responsible for the mass-production of effeminate men… wearing rather brightly coloured coats, cut short and very tight in the waist, their grey flannel trousers will be of a conspicuously silver hue and flow loosely, their feet will be shod with gay suede shoes. They will speak with artificial voices of a somewhat high timbre, also they will walk with a mincing gait.
Certainly, before Elvis made them popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1950s, blue suede shoes were used as a sign identifying a male homosexual wearer in a closeted world, but only to those who had the key to that code. In the postwar period, an era far away from the triumph of Empire, the boot, too, became appropriated by gay subcultures keen to engage in playful exaggerations of masculine identity. The cowboy boot, for example, appeared in kitsch gay art of the 1950s by Quaitance and Tom of Finland and in novels with titles like The Booted Master. The toughness of the boot also became associated with stereotypes of lesbian identity. In contemporary Brazil, the word lesbian is sapatao, which literally means ‘big shoe’.
Today we are at another moment of radical transformation not just for the shape, forms and materials of shoes, but also for the meanings that they convey. Since the early 1970s, the sports shoe, ‘trainer’ or ’sneaker’ has completely changed the definition and notion of a shoe. Produced in high-tech rubber with big brand logos on the outside, trainers promise to enhance our bodily capacities. Designers flock to design them, and youth to buy and customize them. They proclaim that exercise can deliver self improvement, enhancing not just ability, but also self-esteem, attractiveness, bodyshape, health and well-being. To younger generations they suggest limitless choice and Romantic ideas of self-definition and individuality. They tell us that shoes are an amplifying tool, and as in the case of Venetian ladies on their doorsteps, we should not dither, but simply ‘just do it’.
Fashion victim: Naomi Campbell takes a tumble in Vivienne Westwood’s pianette-inspired platforms, 1993.
Ready-made shoes are displayed for sale in ‘The Saint Healing a Shoemaker’ by Jaime Serra, 14th century.
A room of 800,000 shoes at the Nazi death camp of Majdanek in Poland.
Late 16th-century low pianelle in gold and red velvet (below), as worn by Venetian ladies such as these (right) from a 15th-century panel.
Lady’s green silk shoe, 1700-20.
A midwife wearing pattens over her shoes as she braves the elements and dirty cobbles on her way to a labour (Rowlandson, 1811); right a pair of the pattens of the same date.
The cutting of long toes, 15th century. Fashionable across Europe from the early 14th century, these were seen as showing a lack of respect for Christ.
Frau Wilhelmine von Cotta displays a pair of elegant flat slippers beneath her classically-inspired light dress in Gottlieb Schick’s 1802 portrait.
Well-heeled: Louis XIV’s were red (detail from portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701).
Shoehorned: ‘A Wellington Boot or the Head of the Armye’, 1827 - the Duke became as famous for his footwear as his military achievements.
Bootcamp: a military parade in Germany, 1896.
Van Gogh conveys a sense of the universal dignity of labour in this vivid ‘portrait’, ‘Three Pairs of Shoes’, 1886-87.
Patent leather Wellington Boots with red trim, English 1870.
An advertisement for Blundstone Boots, that appeared in Viz magazine in 1993.
Somewhere over the rainbow; sexuality, mobility and magic as worn by Judy Garland on the Yellow Brick Road, 1939.
Have it all: a 1980s advertisement for Adidas trainers.
FOR FUTHER READING
Nancy E. Rexford, Women’s Shoes in America, 1795-1930 (Kent University Press. 2000); Giorgio Riello, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press. 2006); Valerie Steele, Shoes: A Lexicon of Style (Rizzoli, 1999); June Swann, Shoes (B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1982).
See p. 62 for related articles on this subject in the History Today archive at ww.historytoday.com
Giorgio RMb and Peter McNeil are the editors of Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (Berg, 2006).
Copyright History Today Ltd. Mar 2007
(c) 2007 History Today. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
