Men’s Sandals Through the Ages: Discover the Transformation to Today’s Wrap Toes
Put yourself in a warrior’s old boots, a sandal of a Roman gladiator, or sandals and footwear of a medieval wayfarer, and what do you notice first? The sandals, of course. After thousands of years, a historically simple device, footwear offering bloodshed and armour or protection for travellers’ feet, has become a subtle and comfortable daily accessory. It is the expected social norm of every warm season for the legions of men and boys to wear… wrap-toe sandals. Some men prefer to let the world guess whether they are wearing a wrap-toe or a thong sandal. If this simple artifact with a fetching curved toe and an adjustable leather strap is a mystery, you are about to learn how these ubiquitous daily objects evolved and why today’s wrap-toe is a must-have.
The Problem with Traditional Sandals
Men have long been on a quest for footwear that is as protective as it is comfortable but, for millennia, the designs generated were half-baked at best, enduring as much from their corduroy-tough pragmatism as for their lack of sophisticated charm. Rope-soled sandals from Egypt were dressed up with leather for the Romans, for example, but these ancient foot coverings were primitive at best, boasting straps that held shoes together but no arch support or versatility to match the demands of modern life. They were often painful to wear and left little…