Visiting the Only Shoe Museum in North America
Who knew the history of heels started with...men?!
To study footwear is to tell the stories of peoples and places. The original clogs—known as Dutch klomp—tell us about farmers and laborers in 13th century Netherlands. They wore the wooden slip-on shoes to protect their feet from injury and the wet climate. The chopine—a high-platform shoe popular among Venetian women in 16th century Italy—speaks to the country’s social stratification. On one hand, the chopine protected the foot from muddy streets, but it also came to represent material wealth. The Venetian women paraded the impractical footwear under long skirts (that made use of ample fabric) to signal their family’s wealth,“Look how much fabric we can afford to put on!”
The study of shoes helps place people in time and geography, outlining systems of economy, sociopolitical realities, technological developments, norms and values. Much ink has been spilled about clothes, but shoes, as Sonja Bata—the founder of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto—realized, are just as worthy of academic exploration. “Footwear is just the entry point to talking about culture,” curator Nishi Bassi told me.
When Bassi worked as a front desk volunteer, she would always hear from husbands and boyfriends that they only came for their female partners.“Oh you don’t wear shoes?” she’d ask. They looked confused. “Just the fact that [people] think the term shoe is gendered is so interesting,” she says.
No footwear captures this tension quite like like heels.
The History of Heels
“Whenever you say heel to someone the first thing they imagine is a stiletto like a woman’s pump,” Nishi says. “But it’s like ‘no no, men wore it first.’”
In the 10th century, when Western European armies joined forces with Persians to fight the Ottoman Empire, Persian soldiers wore heeled shoes to stabilized themselves on horseback. As Nishi explains, the shoes became a symbol of hypermasculinity and quickly entered men’s fashion in fashion. The trend trickled down to children and similar to the chopine, the heeled shoes became a symbol of aristocracy. Their impracticality made it clear the wearers did not work for a living. Thorstein Veblen’s seminal Theory of the Leisure Class (which would come much later) was already playing out in real time.
Women wouldn’t start wearing heels until the 16th century, an era when wearing men’s accessories became appealing. Women began wearing men’s hats, belts and…you guessed it…heels. Not long after, the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th century happens, which sees men reject color, frills and heels. Somber dress like the three-piece suit emerges during that time. “There was so much anxiety about cementing gender roles in the 18th century,” Nishi says. “Heels become seen as increasingly frivolous.”