History Of High Heels
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| Raised heels are sometimes claimed to have been a response to the problem of the rider's foot slipping forward in stirrups while riding. The "rider's heel," approximately 1-1/2 inch high, appeared around 1500. The leading edge was canted forward to help grip the stirrup, and the trailing edge was canted forward to prevent the elongated heel from catching on underbrush or rock while backing up, such as in on-foot combat. These features are evident today in riding boots, notably cowboy boots.
The simple riding heel gave way to a more stylized heel over its first three decades. Beginning with the French, heel heights among men crept up, often becoming higher and thinner, until they were no longer useful while riding, but were relegated to "court-pony" wear. By the late 1600s, men's heels were commonly between three and four inches in height.
However, high heels may have been worn by women just as early or earlier, both as a fashion statement and to increase short stature. At least as early as 1533, the diminutive Italian wife of Henry II, King of France, Queen Catherine de' Medici, commissioned a cobbler to fashion her a pair of heels, both for fashion, and to suggest greater height. They were an adaptation of chopines and pattens (elevated wooden soles with both heel and toe raised, not unlike modern platform shoes or clogs and sabots), intended to protect the feet of the wearer from dirt and mud; but unlike chopines, the heel was higher than the toe and the "platform" was made to bend in the middle with the foot. That raised shoes had already been worn as a fashion statement in Italy, at least, is suggested by sumptuary laws in Venice that banned the wearing of chopine-style platform shoes as early as the 1430s.
High-heeled shoes quickly caught on with the fashion-conscious men and women of the French court, and spread to pockets of nobility in other countries. The term "well-heeled" became synonymous with opulent wealth.[citation needed] Both men and women continued wearing heels as a matter of noble fashion throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the French Revolution drew near, in the late 1700s, the practice of wearing heels fell into decline in France due to its associations with wealth and aristocracy. Throughout most of the 1800s, flat shoes and sandals were usual for both sexes, but the heel resurfaced in fashion during the late 1800s, almost exclusively among women. |
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