Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (56 page)

That began to change in 1305. Britain’s King Edward I decreed that for a standard of accuracy in certain trades, an inch be taken as the length of three contiguous dried barleycorns. British cobblers adopted the measure and began manufacturing the first footwear in standard sizes. A child’s shoe measuring thirteen barleycorns became commonly known as, and requested by, size 13. And though shoes cut for the right and left foot had gone out of existence after the fall of the Roman Empire, they reemerged in fourteenth-century England.

A new style surfaced in the fourteenth century: shoes with extremely long spiked toes. The vogue was carried to such lengths that Edward III enacted a law prohibiting spikes’ extending two inches beyond the human toe. For a while, people observed the edict. But by the early 1400s, the so-called crakows had attained tips of eighteen inches or more, with wearers routinely tripping themselves.

The crakows, arriving in the creative atmosphere that nurtured the Renaissance, ushered in a new shoe-style trendiness, as one fashion extreme replaced another. The absurdly long, pointed toe, for example, was usurped
by a painfully short, comically broad-boxed toe that in width could accommodate an extra set of digits.

In the seventeenth century, the oxford, a low calf-leather shoe laced up the front through three or more eyelets, originated with cobblers in the academic town of Oxford, England.

In America at the time, shoe design took a step backward. The first colonial cobblers owned only “straight lasts,” that is, single-shape cutting blocks, so right and left footwear was unavailable. The wealthy resorted to British imports. Shoe selection, price, and comfort improved in the mid-eighteenth century when the first American shoe factory opened in Massachusetts. These mass-produced shoes were still cut and stitched by hand, with leather sewn at home by women and children for a shameful pittance, then assembled at the factory.

Complete mechanization of shoemaking, and thus true mass production, was slow in coming. In 1892, the Manfield Shoe Company of Northampton, England, operated the first machines capable of producing quality shoes in standard sizes and in large quantities.

Boots: 1100
B.C
., Assyria

Boots originated as footwear for battle. The Sumerians and the Egyptians sent soldiers into combat barefoot, but the Assyrians, around 1100
B.C
., developed a calf-high, laced leather boot with a sole reinforced by metal.

There is evidence that the Assyrians, as well as the Hittites, both renowned as shoemakers, had right-and left-footed military boots. One translation of a Hittite text tells of Telipinu, god of agriculture, in a foul temper because he inadvertently put “his right boot on his left foot and his left boot on his right foot.”

The Assyrian infantry boot was not readily adopted by Greek or Roman soldiers. From fighting barefoot, they progressed to sandals with hobnail soles for additional grip and wear. It was primarily for extended journeys on foot that Greek and Roman men outfitted themselves in sturdy boots. In cold weather, they were often lined with fur and adorned at the top by a dangling animal paw or tail.

Boots also became the customary footwear for nomadic horse-riding communities in cold mountainous regions and on the open steppes. Their sturdiness, and the slight heel that held the foot in the stirrup, guaranteed boots a role as combat gear. In the 1800s, cobblers in Hesse, Germany, introduced knee-high military boots called Hessians, of polished black leather with a tassel, similar to the Romans’ animal tail, hanging from the top. And during the same period, British shoemakers, capitalizing on a military victory, popularized Wellingtons, high boots named for Arthur Wellesley, the “Iron Duke” of Wellington, who presided over Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.

French high heels c. 1850 and a gentleman’s boots, the earliest shoes to sport elevated heels
.

Boots have been in and out of fashion over the centuries. But one aspect of the boot, its pronounced heel, gave birth to the fashion phenomenon of high-heeled shoes.

High Heels: 16th Century, France

High heels did not appear overnight. They grew inch by inch over decades, with the upward trend beginning in sixteenth-century France. And though the term “high heels” would later become a rubric for women’s elevated footwear, the shoes were first worn by men. In the sixteenth century, there was comparatively little development in women’s shoes because they were hidden under long gowns.

The advantage of an elevated heel on a shoe was first appreciated in horseback riding; a heel secured the foot in the stirrup. Thus, riding boots were the first shoes routinely heeled. And during the Middle Ages, when overcrowding and poor sanitation made human and animal waste street obstacles, boots with thick soles and elevated heels offered a few inches of practical protection as well as a psychological lift.

It was for the purpose of rising above public filth, in fact, that
clogs
were developed during the Middle Ages. They originated in Northern Europe as an
overshoe
, made partly or wholly of wood, with a thick base to protect the wearer’s good leather shoes from street debris. In warmer months, they were often worn in place of a snug-fitting leather shoe.

A German shoe called a
pump
became popular throughout Europe in the mid-1500s. The loose slipper, plain or jeweled, had a low heel, and historians believe its name is onomatopoeic for the “plump, plump” sound
its heel made in flapping against a wood floor. A later woman’s slipper, the scuff, would be thus named.

In the mid-1600s, male boots with high heels were de rigueur in France. The fad was started, and escalated, by the Sun King, Louis XIV. In his reign of seventy-three years, the longest in European history, France attained the zenith of its military power and the French court reached an unprecedented level of culture and refinement. None of Louis’s towering achievements, though, could compensate psychologically for his short height. The monarch at one point had inches added to the heels of his shoes. In a rush to emulate their king, noble men and women at court instructed bootmakers to heighten their own heels. The homage forced Louis into higher heels. When, in time, Frenchmen descended to their anatomical heights, women courtiers did not, thus launching a historic disparity in the heel heights of the sexes.

By the eighteenth century, women at the French court wore brocaded high-heeled shoes with elevations up to three inches. American women, taking the fashion lead from Paris, adopted what was known as the “French heel.” It helped launch a heel polarization in the United States. As women’s heels climbed higher and grew narrower, men’s heels (though not on boots) correspondingly descended. By the 1920s, “high heel” no longer denoted a shoe’s actual heel height but connoted an enticing feminine fashion in footwear.

Loafers
. The laceless, slip-on loafer is believed to have evolved from the Norwegian clog, an early overshoe. It is known with greater certainty that the Weejun loafer was named by a cobbler from Wilton, Maine, Henry Bass, after the final two syllables of “Norwegian.”

Bass began making sturdy, over-the-ankle shoes in 1876 for New England farmers. He eventually expanded his line to include a lumberjack shoe and specialty footwear on request. He constructed insulated hiking boots for both of Admiral Byrd’s successful expeditions to the South Pole, and lightweight flying boots for Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight. In 1936, Henry Bass was shown a Norwegian slipper moccasin that was fashionable at the time in Europe. He secured permission from the Norwegian manufacturer to redesign the shoe for the American market, and the finished loafer launched his Bass Weejun line of footwear. By the late 1950s, the Bass Weejun was the most popular hand-sewn moccasin ever made, a collegiate status symbol in the ancient tradition of the shoe as statement of social position.

Sneakers: 1910s, United States

The rubber-bottomed athletic shoe whose silent footsteps earned it the name “sneaker” had to await a technological breakthrough: the vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear in the 1860s. Goodyear proved that the natural gum from the rubber plant did not have to be sticky when warm
and brittle when cold. Mixed with sulfur, rubber became a dry, smooth, pliant substance, perfect for footwear such as rain galoshes, one of its first successful uses in apparel in the late 1800s.

Before the turn of the century rubber was on the soles of leather shoes. And vulcanized rubber soles were being glued to canvas tops to produce what manufacturers advertised as a revolution in athletic footwear. In 1917, U.S. Rubber introduced Keds, the first popularly marketed sneaker, with a name that suggested “kids” and rhymed with
ped
, the Latin root for “foot.” Those first sneakers were neither all white, nor white soles with black canvas; rather, the soles were black and the canvas was a conservative chestnut brown, because that was the popular color for men’s leather shoes.

The substantive design of sneakers varied little until the early 1960s. Then a former college runner and his coach made a serendipitous observation that ushered in the era of the modern, waffle-soled sneaker. As a miler at the University of Oregon, Phil Knight had preferred to run in European sneakers, lighter in weight than American models. Believing that other track and field athletes would opt to better their performances with high-quality footwear, Knight and coach Bill Bowerman went into the sneaker business in 1962, importing top-notch Japanese models.

The shoes’ reduced weight was an undeniable plus, but Bowerman felt further improvement was possible, especially in the area of traction, a major concern of athletes. Yet he was uncertain what constituted an optimum sole topography. Many manufacturers relied on the shallow peak-and-trough patterns developed for automobile traction. One morning, operating the waffle iron in his home kitchen, Bowerman was inspired to experiment. Stuffing a piece of rubber into the iron, he heated it, producing a deeply waffle-shaped sole pattern that soon would become a world standard for sneakers. In addition to the sole, the new sneakers featured three other innovations: a wedged heel, a cushioned mid-sole as protection against shock, and nylon tops that were lighter and more breathable than the older canvas.

To promote the waffle-soled nylon shoes, named Nikes after the winged Greek goddess of victory, Knight turned to runners in the Olympic trials held in Eugene, Oregon, in 1972. Several marathoners raced in the custom-designed shoes, and advertising copy hailed the sneakers as having been on the feet of “four of the top seven finishers,” omitting to mention that the runners who placed first, second, and third were wearing West Germany’s Adidas sneakers. Nonetheless, waffle-soled sneakers, in a variety of brands, sold so well that by the end of the decade the flatter-soled canvas shoes had been left in the dust.

Pants: Post-15th Century, Italy

St. Pantaleone was a fourth-century Christian physician and martyr known as the “all-merciful.” Beheaded under orders of Roman emperor Diocletian, he became the patron saint of Venice, and a reliquary containing his blood
(allegedly still liquid) is housed in the Italian town of Ravello. Pantaleone is probably the only saint to be dubiously honored by having an article of clothing named after him—though how the attribution came about involves folklore more than fact. His name literally means “all lion” (
pan
, “all”;
leone
, “lion”), and though he was a clever and pious physician, he passed inexplicably into Italian folklore as a lovable but simpleminded buffoon, decidedly unsaintly in character.

It is the comic Pantaleone of folklore, through behavior and attire, who eventually gave his name to pants. An abject slave to money, he starved servants until their skeletons cast no shadow, and though he valued a gentlemanly reputation, he flirted with women, who publicly mocked him. These traits are embodied in a gaunt, swarthy, goateed Pantaleone of the sixteenth-century Italian
commedia dell’arte
. The character wore a pair of trousers, tight from ankle to knee, then flaring out like a petticoat.

The comedy genre was carried by bands of traveling actors to England and France. And the Pantalone character always appeared in exaggerated trousers. In France, the character and his pants came to be called
Pantalon
; in England,
Pantaloon
. Shakespeare helped popularize the British term in
As You Like It
.

In the eighteenth century, when pantaloons—by then a stylized form of knee breeches—reached the shores of America, their name was shortened to “pants.” And in this century, the fashion industry, when referring to stylish women’s trousers, has further abbreviated the word to “pant.”

Whereas St. Pantaleone circuitously lent his name to pants, the ancient Celts donated their word for men’s leg coverings,
trews
, to “trousers,” while the Romans contributed their word for a baggy type of breeches,
laxus
, meaning “loose,” to “slacks.” The one convenience all these ancient leg coverings lacked was pockets.