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One of my favorite shoes from the V&A Golden Age of Couture show that Jitterbugbaby posted about were these gilded Roger Vivier for Christian Dior pumps, Paris 1952-4.
They certainly don’t make shoes like these anymore.
Today’s shoe history corner is as much about the person as the controversial blade shoes. Featured as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for 2008, Oscar’s story is historic and an inspirational story in the face of adversity.
…Oscar Pistorius’ lower legs were amputated at age 1, few would have banked on this South African challenging world-class sprinters. At 20, when he began to close in on an Olympic-qualifying time for the 400 m, experts posited that his times were so good, he must have been getting an un-fair advantage from his bladelike prosthetics. When he set his sights on the Olympic Games in Beijing, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled he couldn’t compete against able-bodied athletes. An IAAF-initiated study found that more energy is returned to Pistorius’ upper legs from his blades than from ankles and calf muscles and that he uses less oxygen.
Pistorius, 21, is appealing, on the basis of studies with differing results. It was only recently that living with prosthetic legs was seen as a huge impediment, but he has turned this perception upside down. He’s on the cusp of a paradigm shift in which disability becomes ability, disadvantage becomes advantage. Yet we mustn’t lose sight of what makes an athlete great. It’s too easy to credit Pistorius’ success to technology. Through birth or circumstance, some are given certain gifts, but it’s what one does with those gifts, the hours devoted to training, the desire to be the best, that is at the true heart of a champion.
Ah, to be a passionate British heroine running in the meadows sparkling under morning dew! What would you wear? Why, something completely impractical, of course, like these brown kid and embroidered pale blue striped damask shoes with pink silk throat ruffles, top line binding, and small heels (ca. 1795).
By now, we’re all familiar with the Marc Jacobs “inverted heel” pumps, right? Here’s a little visual aid:
Some have already remarked on the quasi-similarity with the work of famous shoe designer Andre Perugia, who was experimenting with heel-less shoes as early as the 1930s. Perugia is a whole fashion chapter in and by himself, and the similarity is definitely there, but we here at Shoeblog believe we’ve found an even uncannier resemblance in these vintage black pumps, ca. 1958-1960 (unlabeled, American or Italian-made):
Turns out that the desire for novelty in women’s shoes gave birth to this particular design concept, a “floating heel,” made with a cantilevered sole and elevated mid-sole cast from one piece of metal sturdy enough to support the wearer’s weight. The patent belonged to Martin Friedmann (1956). Here’s one more example:
According to Jonathan Waldorf, author of The Seductive Shoe, this was “a short-lived fad” that died ca. 1961.
Well, until Marc Jacobs brought it back in 2008, that is!
Sometimes we tend believe that we invented high fashion and that haute couture extravagant excesses are a product of modernity. Even a cursory look at history, however, we’ll humble us in this respect. For example, the dark, drab, and hemp-clad Middle Ages could take a fashion point and stretch it to ridiculous lengths. Beginning with the 12th century and through the 15th century, shoemakers starting making shoes that resembled dangerous weaponry much more than they resembled the actual shape of the human foot:
It seemed that even in regard to shoes, the longer, the better–so some gentlemen actually had to tie the tips of their shoes to garters arround their knees to be able to walk.
Supposedly, at the English court, “noblemen took this fashion to such extremes they found it hard to walk, and laws were introduced to regulate shoe lengths!”
I’m sure future ages will look upon the fashion of our times with the same kind of amazement-amusement mix.
(Pictures and info: from A Fashionable History of the Shoe, by Helen Reynolds.)
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