8000 B.C. In Missouri, the remains of Native American shoes are found.
3300 B.C. An ice merchant who died high in the mountains of France left behind a primitive pair of shoes woven from grass.
3000 BC Paintings of shoes or shoemakers can be found in Egyptian temples.
100 A.D. Bare feet were the most fundamental difference in clothing between Greek slaves and free men.
200 A.D. Roman Emperor Marco. Aurelius declares that red sandals are forbidden to anyone but him and his heirs.
15th century Knights wore shoes with long toes (24 inches long), and the law, which had always promoted thrift, explicitly specified the length of the toes.
Early 16th century High heels were invented under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci.
In the mid-16th century, 30-inch heels were popular throughout southern Europe.
Early 17th Century As one of the most popular accents, shoelaces appeared.
Late 17th Century Due to a mistranslation, Cinderella's flannel slipper, from the French fairy tale, became Cinderella's crystal slipper.
Mid-18th century It took nearly a century to finally replace the traditional method of shoemaking, and the first shoe factory appeared. The first shoe store soon followed in Boston.
Early 19th century Flat shoes and Greek beach shoes were popular.
Mid-19th century The first sneakers (also known as rubber-soled canvas shoes) appeared. Then Elias and Howe invented the first pinwheel.
The end of the 19th century The indispensable ornament of clothing, the clasp button, was also applied to shoes, and soon became a fashion standard.
Before this century, shoemaking was as lowly a trade as carpentry, blacksmithing and tailoring. Shoe design was not considered a separate, artistic endeavor, but was seen as part of the overall shoemaking process.
Famous shoe designers rose to prominence mainly in Europe, because in the United States, with the rapid development of mass production in the modern shoe industry, the individual shoemaker became redundant. The shoe industry in the United States began in the colonies of New England, where farmers made their own shoes in their kitchens in the winter. Entire families were involved in this work. The men cut the leather and affixed the soles, and the women sewed the edges. The workbenches used by colonial shoemakers are now collectors' items. Having mastered the art of shoemaking, some enterprising farmers opened small shoe workshops, where three or four workers worked together to put together and sole the materials sewn by the local shoemakers, and then made the finished shoes.
In 1750, a shoe factory was built in Leen, Massachusetts, which led to the further development of local shoemaking techniques. There workers no longer made shoes independently; each part of the shoe's production was handled by a trained and dedicated person. Production lines began to take shape. At first shoes were still made to order, but in order to give the workers something to do during the off-season, the owners of the shoe factories began to make shoes that were not booked. These shoes were called for-sale shoes and were displayed in the windows of local stores. In the early days, the Harvey brothers loaded up their wagons with for-sale shoes and peddled them around the neighborhood.
In 1793, they opened the first retail shoe store in Boston, selling finished shoes every Wednesday and Saturday. Inventors have been working on improvements to the sewing machine since the mid-eighteenth century. It wasn't until 1790 that the first sewing machine dedicated to leather processing was adapted by an Englishman named Thomas Saint. It was pretty much just an awl that went up vertically to make holes in the leather. The Englishman, Sir Mark Browler, was a member of the Port of New York. Sir Mark Brownler, who was chief engineer of the Port of New York, invented a press that sewed the upper to the sole with a metal needle. In order to do his part in Britain's war against Napoleon, Browler produced 400 pairs of shoes a day with the help of disabled soldiers. After the war, the British shoe industry returned to manual labor.
In 1810, similar machines appeared in the United States. At the same time, two Frenchmen named Ingeborg Buhler and Jolieleur were building such machines in Paris. A shoemaker from Stuttgart, Germany, named Bressi experimented with screws to attach the upper to the sole, and in 1829 a man named Nathaniel Nionado of Merrimack, Massachusetts, in the United States, made the final refinement of the shoe-studding machine. Around 1812, Thomas Blanchard of Shotton, Massachusetts, converted a lathe for making gunstocks into a machine for carving shoe lasts, which were wooden molds made into the shape of the shoe on which the shoe was assembled. In the 1830s, still in New England, cobblers began to cut uppers with the help of molds, rather than relying on individual cutting skills. In the 1840s, the use of rolling mills for leather compression facilitated the molding of the heel-reinforced back of the upper. The British continued to make shoes by hand until the late nineteenth century, when they were forced by economic necessity to switch to machine production. It was then that they realized that all the patents belonged to the Americans and they had to rent American machines and pay royalties. But this also allowed England to retain a strong tradition of handmade shoes.
In 1846, Ellis Howie of Spencer, Massachusetts, registered a sewing machine as a patent. The machine could sew not only fabric but also leather with waxed thread. Three years later, American inventor Ishaq M. Singer invented the sewing machine with a treadle in Boston.
In 1858, Leeman B. Black invented machines that could sew the soles and uppers of shoes together. Two years later, a gentleman named Mack perfected the machine. Over the next 21 years, Black and Mack combined forces to monopolize the shoe-making industry. In Italy, the tradition of handmade shoes continued into the twentieth century, while in France, the design of customized shoes was closely integrated with the modestly produced fashion industry. The Parisian fashion industry was founded by an Englishman named Charles Frederick Woos, who opened a fashion house at 7 rue de la Pace in Paris in 1858. He was the first to launch a collection of garments each season and called on young girls to model them. As the first person to rise to the top of the fashion world, he was also the first to set up a system for designing clothes that could be mass-produced in Parisian factories and sold all over the world. Princess Pauline de Maitrich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to France, wore one of his dresses to a ball at the court of Napoleon III, which gave him his first great opportunity. Soon Napoleon III's wife, Empress Josényi, and other noblewomen at court began to wear Wuss's clothes. He designed the luxurious petticoats of the Second Empire period and added waist pads to the back, making them the standard dress for women in the 1870s and 1880s. Woos dominated dress codes and before his death in 1895, he was making clothes for all the royal families of Europe. Some garments were secretly sent to Queen Victoria's court without even being labeled. After Worth's death, the business was taken over by his two sons, Gaston and Jean Philippe. They soon realized that fashion was changing rapidly, and in 1900, in order to keep up with the ever-changing fashion tastes, they brought in the designer Paul Bolles, who was only 21 years old at the time. Pollux's avant-garde clothes soon appeared on the celebrities of the day. After four years with the Wirth Brothers, he left them to start his own business. By that time, a number of other boutiques - Pacquiao, Cheroot, Dorset - had sprung up around the Worth Brothers' store and on the neighboring Place Vend?me, and Paris had become the center of the world's fashion industry. Most shoemakers worked quietly for the boutiques, but a few began to become well-known shoe designers.
The fashionable woman who wore a Bolles or Paquet costume must have been wearing shoes designed by Chabrieri of the Rue de Lisieux or Ferry of the Rue de la Gourangie-Bataille. Pilot of the Rue de la Paradis Possessionnelle was one of the most up-to-date of these designers. Born in 1817, the son of a country shoemaker, he learned the art of shoemaking from his father, and in 1855 he traveled to Paris, where he earned a reputation among buyers in the fashion industry with the Worth Brothers, thanks in large part to his designs for heels that were thinner and straighter than the Louis heels that were popular at the time. When Pilot retired, his son took over the business. Until World War II, Pillette's shoes were known for their nobility and elegance.
While Pillette's shoe stores in London and Paris attracted thousands of customers, another famous shoe designer who started work in Paris during World War I won only 20 customers. His name was Pietro Gentini and he claimed to be "the designer with the highest price in the world". This guaranteed him an exclusive clientele. His shoes are now on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in New York City. After Yann Turner, André Perugi is another young designer from Leys. He learned his shoemaking skills from his Italian father. Perugi was brought to Paris by Paulette and worked in many fashion houses. The number of shoes he designed that are now on display at the Musée de la Chausse in Norman, France, is two thousand.
Salvatore Ferragamo, a young Italian shoemaker, brought the art of handmade women's shoes back to the United States when he immigrated to Boston in 1914. Deeply disappointed with American machine-made shoe-making methods, he moved to California and became a prop maker while handcrafting shoes for movie people. Soon movie stars began buying his shoes. After he returned to Italy in 1927, the stars remained loyal customers. In the 1930s, he developed shoes with cork soles, which were popular for more than a decade. After his death, his masterpieces toured the world.
In the 1940s, a young Englishman named David Ivins came to the West Coast of the United States after Ferragamo and became a shoe designer for Hollywood stars. He also designed shoes for some of New York's most famous fashion designers, including Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta. Meanwhile, the legendary Roger Ver went to Paris to work for Christian Dale, where he became famous for designing women's shoes with thin high heels. His creative works are also sought after by art museums around the world.
There is now a new generation of shoe designers in Europe and the United States, whose work is already favored by customers and fashion designers, although no museums have yet noticed them. The work of Maro Blahnik, Joan Halpern, Maud Frejean, Bess and Hobart Levine, Ande Fest, Jane Jensen, Patrick Cox, and Kristin Lubbers is more inspired, and it is safe to say that their work will one day enjoy the same status as that of their well known predecessors. Their shoes will be appreciated as works of art, not just protectors for their feet.