5 things I didn’t know about high heels
I have this love for the history of fashion and last night seeing that I couldn’t sleep anyway, I decided to get up at the unearthly hour of 4 a.m and see what I could dig up. Here’s what I found out about high heels.
1. The earliest heels can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. I don’t really want to think about it, but the heels were used by Egyptian butchers to raise them above the carnage. How do we know this?? Murals have been found on temple walls. So we know who to thank now don’t we. :)
2. In the mid 1500s, Catherine de Medici decided that she wanted to be tall and willowy and commissioned a cobbler to fashion her a pair of shoes that would do just that. And at the time, no one was about to question her motives. An interesting lady was Catherine de Medici. While some might think that she was incredibly ruthless, the life that was forced upon her was tragic.
3. I also found a little infor about a shoe called chopines, popular among women in Italy, Spain and France, that could elevate them by up to 24 inches. A Venetian lady wearing chopines needed two servants to help her in and out of a gondola. It’s no wonder. There are times when I’m nervous about the height of some of my heels, but then again, I don’t have servants at my beck and call.
4. It was also fashionable for the weathy to have tiny feet and this was often brought about during the early childhood years. It must have been extremely painful, but the children of this class were forced to wear shoes to prevent their feet from growing. So you had a generation or so of women with disfigured feet that would be stuffed into shoes that had nothing to do with comfort.
5. “The needle-sharp heel called the stiletto, from the Italian word for “dagger,” appeared in the postwar years of the early 1950s. After the war and years of Rosie the Riveter masculine dress, fashion turned feminine; the focus turned to babymaking. Technology contributed a steel core allowing for a thin heel that lifted the shoe up like a skyscraper (previous heels, made of wood, could break). Voilà! The beautiful, dangerous stiletto stepped out. I didn’t know that stiletto was the Italian word for dagger, but having seen a few extreme versions, I guess the name is fitting!
At the moment I am sitting at my desk with barefeet and as gorgeous as some heels are these days, my feet are thanking me.
;)
Boobs, Boys, and High Heels: Or How to Get Dressed in Just Under Six Hours
Tags: barefeet, Catherine-de-Medici, chopines, high-heels, history-of-shoes, stilettoRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Her Accessories, Historical Accessories, Shoes and Boots
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