20 Popular Shoes With Surprisingly Strange Histories

In 1917, Converse released its canvas “Non-Skid” basketball shoe. Semi-professional player Chuck Taylor signed on with the brand as a traveling salesman in 1921 and campaigned for modifications to the shoe’s ankle support and flexibility. In 1932, Converse added his cursive signature to the star ankle patch. It was fashion’s first signature athletic shoe. Talk about a successful sales pitch.

From the 1400s to the 1600s, chopines were platform overshoes, usually made of wood or cork, used by wealthy women in Venice and Spain to elevate their silk gowns above the muddy streets. They could be more than 18 inches high and required the help of a servant to walk around in. In 1430, the ruling council of Venice decided chopines shouldn’t be higher than 3 inches, but few paid attention. Eighteen inches compared with three is a pretty generous interpretation of the rules!

Heels used to snap when they were carved too thin for elegance. From 1950 to 1954, designers Roger Vivier, working with Dior, along with fellow shoe designers Salvatore Ferragamo and André Perugia, separately began inserting a thin steel rod into heels. This new strength was made possible by advances in metalworking after World War II. The result was heels taller than 3 inches that held firm. But no single designer deserves the credit.

Between 1350 and 1480, poulaines, a style of pointed shoe popular among European aristocrats, were stuffed at the toes with moss or wool and pulled out into long points to show that their wearers did not perform manual labor. A 1463 law passed by King Edward IV of England that sought to curb extravagant attire kept the toe points of the lower classes to 2 inches. In 2021, researchers at Cambridge University discovered bunions on medieval skeletons from people who had worn them. 16th-century writers claimed that wearers would chain the tips of their poulaines to their knees. There is no evidence for this.

In 1936, G.H. Bass, a Maine shoe manufacturer, introduced a slip-on shoe dubbed the “Weejun,” which was inspired by a 1930 Norwegian moccasin slipper created by Nils Tveranger and embellished with a slotted strip of leather. By the 1950s, Ivy League students began inserting a penny into the slit for decorative purposes. Rumor had it that the pennies were for emergency calls on campus payphones. However, phone calls then ran from 5 to 10 cents, meaning a single penny would not have covered the cost.

In 1851, Queen Victoria’s bootmaker J. Sparkes-Hall obtained a patent for his ankle boot featuring elastic side gussets. This was made possible by the invention of vulcanized rubber, a chemical treatment developed by Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock that gave rubber its stretchiness and durability. Queen Victoria began wearing the boots, soon nicknamed “paddock boots,” every day. They were not renamed Chelsea boots until the 1950s, when they were taken up by London’s fashionable Chelsea Set.

In 1949, the British shoemaker George Cox launched a thick crepe-rubber-soled shoe, called the “Hamilton,” inspired by military surplus desert boots. The British “Teddy Boy” youth culture of the 1950s embraced it. Nightlife slang, tied partly to the 1953 song “The Creep,” gave the shoe its nickname, “brothel creepers,” though Cox never used that name officially. The tabloid press reported that the soles doubled as weapons, but the evidence for that claim is mostly anecdotal rather than factual.

Single-strap bar shoes had been standard children’s wear throughout the nineteenth century. In 1902, cartoonist Richard F. Outcault created a comic called Buster Brown and named the title character’s friend Mary Jane. When Outcault licensed his characters for use by the Brown Shoe Company two years later at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, they began marketing the strap shoe to children across the country as Mary Janes.

Back in 1941, American designer Claire McCardell teamed up with theatrical shoemaker Salvatore Capezio to add hard leather street soles to traditional ballet slippers. Then in 1947, French shoemaker Rose Repetto launched her own dance shoes in Paris. A pair of red “Cendrillon” flats that she made for French actress Brigitte Bardot to wear in the 1956 film And God Created Woman ignited a worldwide craze that was boosted by another star, Audrey Hepburn.

In 1941, Nathan Clark, a British officer fighting in World War II, spotted soldiers in the area around Cairo wearing suede boots with crepe rubber soles. The soldiers had purchased them privately from cobblers in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar who had copied the design of a South African boot known as “veldskoen,” and they were never an official military issue. He sent patterns back to the UK and released the civilian version, the Clarks Desert Boot, at the Chicago Shoe Fair in 1949.

In the 1930s, Salvatore Ferragamo, who by then had become famous as a shoe designer, was unable to obtain the steel needed for heel shanks or the high-quality leather that he required because of Italian trade sanctions. He tried using Sardinian cork, which he patented as the cork platform sole in 1938. He also made a multicolored “Rainbow” platform sandal for actress Judy Garland’s personal wardrobe, not for a movie.

A.G. Spalding made the original Saddle Shoe in 1906, designing it as an indoor athletic oxford. The shoe was created with a contrasting dark leather strap, shaped like a saddle, over the instep to give additional support to players while playing sports. It has since come a long way from the courts, and it’s now considered an academic style.

Count Alfred d’Orsay, a French dandy living in London, is said to have cut away the side leather of his military dress pumps in the 1830s to relieve the pressure they put on his wide feet. This fix led to the ‘d’Orsay’ look, featuring an open arch between a structured heel and a distinct toe box. This is a story from 19th-century footwear accounts rather than any hard documentation.

The Oxonian, a half boot with a low cut and side slits, was first worn by Oxford students around 1800 as a more comfortable alternative to the high-kneed boots demanded by their dress code. With its characteristic closed lacing and eyelet tabs attached beneath the vamp instead of on top of it, the Oxford shoe we know today was born.

Catalan documents as early as 1322 refer to “espardenyes” as a basic country shoe. Craftsmen in the Pyrenees attached the canvas tops to soles of esparto grass or jute rope, creating light, breathable footwear ideal for the working classes of Spain and southern France. Little has changed in 700 years. Now that’s one shoe trend with staying power.

The term “brogue” comes from the Gaelic word “bróg.” The shoe originated in 16th-century Ireland and Scotland as a sturdy outdoor work shoe made from untanned leather. Holes were punched completely through the leather so that water from bogs and marshes could quickly escape. Dress brogues today feature the same perforations but are made with a full lining, which means that they are strictly decorative.

In 1916, the U.S. Rubber Company put all its shoe production under one banner, Keds. The shoes had vulcanized rubber soles that allowed wearers to move almost silently. Henry Nelson McKinney, an advertising man, caught on and began marketing the shoes as “sneakers” because you could sneak around in them without being heard. The name stuck, and sneakers they became.

By the time the Charleston and other popular Jazz Age dances took off in the early 1920s, it was becoming apparent that regular pumps were coming off feet at a high frequency as the dance floor became increasingly frenetic. Shoe manufacturers developed a vertical leather strap connecting the toe vamp to a horizontal ankle band, holding the pump securely to the foot while elongating the calf. If the dancing was going to get wilder, the shoes apparently needed a seatbelt.

Long before Marilyn Monroe’s era, European aristocrats wore backless mules indoors; they appear painted in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 work “The Swing.” In the 1950s, an American inventor named Maxwell Sacks patented the “Spring-o-Lator,” an elastic insole strip that provided tension to keep the backless heel attached to the foot as the wearer walked. The designer Beth Levine put Sacks’s contraption in a high-fashion mule under the Herbert Levine label, the company she ran with her husband. It was Marilyn Monroe who popularized them.

Chanel’s iconic two-tone slingback pump, launched in 1957 in collaboration with Parisian shoemaker Raymond Massaro, had a beige leather body to make the leg appear longer and a black toe cap that shortened the length of the foot (and hid scuffs). The heel was just five centimeters tall, which is about 2 inches. It offered comfort disguised as glamour.

This content was created with the help of AI.