Shoes fashionista

NEW YORK – Flats, platforms, Christian louboutin wedges and stilettos. louboutin Sandals, slippers, boots and clogs. Craftsmen and haute designers have been tweaking women’s footwear for centuries to reflect culture, politics and utility, but few have broken through with truly renegade reinventions.

“There are adaptations, but actual world-changing innovation is a lot less common than we might want to believe,” said Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

The museum collects, exhibits and interprets footwear from around the world, with 13,000 examples of early designs and styles. Many are still referenced today, from thong sandals of the ancient East to towering chopines of Renaissance Europe.

Semmelhack credits thinkers such as Salvatore Ferragamo for his wartime cork wedges and Alexander McQueen for his 10-inch lobster claws, but she points to the rise of celebrity designers themselves as perhaps the most influential development of all.

“Did you even think about who made your Keds? Over the course of the 20th century, shoemakers have gone from anonymous craftsmen to fashion trendsetters,” she said. “It’s a relatively new phenomenon.”

So when, exactly, did shoes begin? No one knows precisely.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis theorize that western Eurasians used supportive footwear nearly 30,000 years ago. Simpler, ill-fitting coverings protected feet in harsh climates about 50,000 years ago, according to other research.

The oldest surviving specimens of shoes appear to be sagebrush-bark strap sandals, found in caves of the northern Great Basin in western North America; they are thought to be more than 9,000 years old.

Sandals haven’t changed all that much since, or from ancient times in Egypt, Greece and China. Strappy gladiator touches have never gone out of style, bejeweled thongs mimic the practice of placing precious gems on shoes for royalty, and platforms in the West can be traced in an almost unbroken timeline right on through to Carmen Miranda and Lady Gaga.

A surviving Spanish chopine mule with tooled leather over cork heels dates to before 1540 as one of the earliest platforms, Semmelhack said. One of the oldest depictions of people wearing high wooden clogs is found in stone carvings of servants on a 12th-century church in France, according to the Bata museum.

Even older, a wooden Japanese thong platform called a geta, with separate heel pieces, has been traced to 300 B.C.

The West didn’t take to high, narrow stilettos till the 1950s, but chunkier heels detached from the front of a sole were everywhere among the upper crust in the 17th and 18th centuries. The separate high heel, Semmelhack said, “came into fashion in Europe but was worn in the Near East before it was of any interest to Europeans.”

Chopines’ height has a long history played out in the extreme: up to 20-inch-high versions in 16th-century Venice.

“Venetian women were actually sequestered and only put on view at certain times of the year,” Semmelhack said. “You don’t actually see the chopines themselves. They were put under women’s dresses. The cost of textiles was so high that wearing chopines meant more fabric and, therefore, higher status. They needed to lean on two servants.”

Color often shows up in shoes via long-lasting louboutin bootsand movies, which transport women back to their childhood romps through their mothers’ closets.

“Footwear has this special place,” said Stuart Weitzman, who has a long relationship with glitzy heels and a new spring line of chunky, jeweled and studded jelly sandals and shoes.