History Behind High Heels Being into Fashion
Keep your head and heels high.
Clothing is one of the first things we notice about a person. Our idea of fashion is still evolving despite being culturally and regionally defined. Clothing style has evolved into a means for representing sex, age, gender, civilization, geographical place, and historical epoch. Shoes, like any other article of clothing, were designed to protect your feet, but heels are not exactly practical. When you hear the word, high heels, you typically think of women’s shoes. However, heels have a rich and interesting history as they evolved rapidly over time. There may be various motivations for wearing heels, such as beauty, elegance, power, comfort, or anything else. Additionally, humans do not gravitate toward heels as a species; if someone wants to feel more comfortable, appear taller and graceful, be the most prominent person on stage, and generally dominate the room, they can wear high heels in any shape.
The concept of high heels dates back to ancient Greece, where performers wore kothorni, one of the first identified high-level styles of shoes. The shoes known as kothorni were flat, with solid wooden or cork soles measuring about four inches thick; however, they were not to be worn off stage. The height of heels was used in Greek plays to show the social status of various characters. People playing important roles on stage wore high heels according to their specifications in the play. There is also evidence that ancient Egyptians, like Greeks, utilized heels for holy occasions rather than normal use. Researchers are still unsure of the objective behind the use of heels in those practices.
Not too far back, I am going to begin somewhere around the tenth century. High-heeled shoes first appeared in the tenth century. The Persian soldiers wore high-heeled shoes to keep their feet in place, and the shoes provided the stability needed to remain upright while shooting their bows and arrows. We are able to argue that high-heeled shoes were designed specifically for men rather than women. The invention then spread to Europe from Asia when certain persons, most likely officials, visited Europe in the 16th century. When they arrived, the Europeans were captivated by their style of military high heels and copied it for themselves.
In the 1500s, a noble Persian ruler named Shah visited Europe on a journey while wearing finely-heeled shoes. People there were charmed by his look and began wearing high-heeled shoes. Shoes with raised wooden soles were deemed significantly more valuable since high heels kept people out of the mud and litter on the streets.
High heels were common until the 16th century, but wearing them became a female concept much later. Although women were wearing wedges at the time, Catherine de Medici was the first registered woman to wear high heels, which she wore for the first time at her wedding. During the preparations for her wedding to the future king of France, the fourteen-year-old girl Catherine de Medici found herself competing with the Duke’s taller mistress, so she hired a cobbler to make her a two-inch heel. Catherine was regarded as the female who established the high-heel style in Paris, however, the trend of women wearing high heels faded after Catherine died.
In the 18th century, high heels were viewed as a mark of honor in France. People created those specially constructed shoes as a symbol of social class division, as King Louis Xiv of France chose the heel style. He wore shoes with four-inch-high heels that were finely constructed for his court footwear; the monarch also developed a hallmark of red-painted heels. He ordered all of the men in his court to dye their heels the same color. People began to make their heels higher based on their social status: high heels for the wealthy; German novelist Klaus H. Carl discussed the height of high heels in his book. Commoners were allowed half an inch, the bourgeois one inch, knights one and a half inches, nobles two inches, and princesses two and a half inches. The style of breadth varied over time, with males adopting thick heels and women wearing thin heels. However, in 1791, Napoleon banned high heels to establish equality among the French people.
Short wedges and spring heels were layered with a leather layer, replacing the iconic piece of fashion for decades. When sewing machines became widely available in the 1860s, the Victorians were given credit for reintroducing high heels. The high heels expanded to America as designers experimented with European fashion, despite criticism that the shoe was too sexually aggressive. The United States established its first heel factory in 1888, with its overwhelming success and affiliation with high fashion high heels. At this point, men no longer wore heels; they were now reserved for ladies. Photography is widely attributed with making the high heel a popular fetishized object, particularly during World War II, when men plastered images of females in heels over Europe’s battlegrounds. According to several fashion historians and sex anthropologists, this was the point in history when people found the sexual stance heels invented in the 1950s.
Roger Vivier designed the first stiletto heel for Christian Dior’s fashion collections, naming it after the Italian word for a slender blade. In early 2000, Hollywood immediately recognized the shoes as a serious sex symbol. There are certain health concerns related to the dangers of wearing heels, with stories of injury to ankles, bones, muscles, and balance causing women to reconsider before wearing any type of heels.
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