Much historical footwear looks like torture – and extreme and unstable designs are still being made. Why can’t we all just be comfortable?
“In a world governed by ideal economic conditions … there will be no sensible shoes,” 1920s shoe designer André Perugia once said. We’re all wearing comfy, sexless trainers now, so draw your own conclusions. Thankfully, history has plenty of silly footwear at hand to amuse us, while we wonder where all our money went.
Paleoanthropologists can tell when we started to wear shoes regularly by looking at feet: toe bones became spindlier about 40,000 years ago. Most of that footwear was too organic to survive. The oldest known example is a pair of sagebrush bark sandals that are probably about 10,000 years old and look like something many Guardian readers would wear; while Ötzi the iceman had a chic-er pair in 3300-ish BC, with a bearskin base, deerskin side panels, and a bark-string net to pull them closed. “The thick layer of hairs gives good insulation and a soft feeling to walk on,” a researcher who reconstructed them commented, which sounds like a four-star review to me.
