The Art of the Shoe. Marie-Josèphe Bossan

      Aside from noticing a shoe for its comfort or elegance, contemporaries rarely take interest in this necessary object of daily life. However, the shoe is considerable in the history of civilization and art.

      In losing contact with nature, we have lost sight of the shoe’s profound significance. In recapturing this contact, in particular through sports, we begin its rediscovery. Shoes for skiing, hiking, hunting, football, tennis or horseriding are carefully chosen, indispensable tools as well as revealing signs of occupation or taste.

      In previous centuries, when people depended more on the climate, vegetation and condition of the soil, while most jobs involved physical labour, the shoe held an importance for everyone which today it holds for very few. We do not wear the same shoes in snow as in the tropics, in the forest as in the steppe, in the swamps as in the mountains or when working, hunting or fishing. For this reason, shoes give precious indications of habitats and modes of life.

      In strongly hierarchical societies, organized by castes or orders, clothing was determinant. Princes, bourgeoisie, soldiers, clergy and servers were differentiated by what they wore. The shoe revealed, less spectacularly than the hat, but in a more demanding way, the respective brilliance of civilizations, unveiling the social classes and the subtlety of the race; a sign of recognition, just as the ring slips only onto the slenderest finger, the “glass slipper” will not fit but the most delicate of beauties.

      The shoe transmits its message to us by the customs which impose and condition it. It teaches us of the deformations that were forced on the feet of Chinese women and shows us how in India, by conserving the unusual boots, the nomadic horsemen of the North attained their sovereignty over the Indian continent; we learn that ice-skates evoke the Hammans while babouches suggest the Islamic interdiction to enter holy places with covered feet.

      Sometimes the shoe is symbolic, evoked in ritual or tied to a crucial moment of existence. One tells of the purpose high-heels served: to make the woman taller on her wedding night in order to remind her that it is the only moment when she will dominate her husband.

      The boots of the Shaman were decorated with animal skins and bones in order to emulate the stag; as the stag, he could run in the world of spirits. We are what we wear, so if to ascend to a higher life it is necessary to ornate the head, if it becomes an issue of ease of movement, it is the feet that are suited for adornment. Athena had shoes of gold, for Hermes, it was heels. Perseus, in search of flight, went to the nymphs to find winged sandals.

      Tales respond to mythology. The seven-league boots, which enlarged or shrunk to fit the ogre or Little Thumb, allowed them both to run across the universe. “You have only to make me a pair of boots,” said Puss in Boots to his master, “and you will see that you are not so badly dealt as you believe.”

      Does the shoe therefore serve to transcend the foot, often considered as the most modest and least favored part of the human body? Occasionally, without a doubt, but not always. The barefoot is not always deprived of the sacred and, thus, can communicate this to the shoe. Those who supplicate or venerate are constantly throwing themselves at the feet of men; it is the feet of men who leave a trace on humid or dusty ground, often the only witness to their passage. A specific accessory, the shoe can sometimes serve to represent he who has worn it, who has disappeared, of whom we do not dare to retrace the traits; the most characteristic example is offered by primitive Buddhism evoking the image of its founder by a seat or by a footprint.

      Made of the most diverse materials, from leather to wood, from fabric to straw, or whether plain or ornamented, the shoe, by its form and decoration, becomes an object of art. If the form is sometimes more functional than esthetic – but not always, and there will be a place to explain many aberrant forms – the design of the cloth, the broidery, the incrustations, the choice of colours, always closely reveal the artistic characteristics of their native country.

      The essential interest comes from that which it is not; weapons or musical instruments are reserved for a caste or a determined social group, carpets are the products of only one or two civilizations, it does not stand up as a “sumptuous” object of the rich classes or a folkloric object of the poor. The shoe has been used from the bottom to the top of the social ladder, by all the individuals of any given group, from group to group, by the entire world.

      From Antiquity up to our days

      3. Clay model of shoe with upturned toe from an Azerbaijanian tomb, 13th-12th century BC. Bally Museum, Schönenwerd, Switzerland.

      4. Iron shoe. Syria, 800 BC. Bally Museum, Schönenwerd, Switzerland.

      Prehistory

      Prehistoric man evidently was unfamiliar with shoes: the Stone Age markings that are known to us all indicate bare feet. But the cave paintings discovered in Spain dating from the Upper Paleolithic period (around 14,000 BC) show Magdalenian man dressed in fur boots. According to the French paleontologist and prehistorian Father Breuil (1877–1961), Neolithic man covered

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