Shoes are a two-hundred-billion-dollar left-and-right industry
Footwear usually comes in mirrored pairs to protect and comfort feet that already handle rough ground. Form followed function, then fashion—high heels for occasions, sandals to sneakers. Leather, wood and canvas yielded to rubber and plastics in a global business worth about $200 billion a year.
The oldest shoes yet found are sagebrush-bark sandals from Fort Rock Cave in Oregon, uncovered in 1938 and dated to roughly 10,500 to 9,200 years ago. Armenia's Areni-1 cave yielded the oldest leather shoe in 2008, a single piece of cowhide laced front and back and thought to date from 3500 BC, and Ötzi the Iceman's footwear of 3300 BC combined bearskin soles, deerskin sides and a bark-string net. Indirect clues go back much further: crisp-edged, toeless prints with strap divots in South African parks date between 73,000 and 136,000 years ago, and small toe bones became thinner about 40,000 to 26,000 years ago, hinting that shoes were by then worn routinely.
Ancient attitudes differed sharply. Egyptian murals from 4000 BC show thong sandals, but many Egyptians, Hindus and Greeks preferred bare feet; Greek athletes competed barefoot and Alexander's armies marched unshod. Rome, by contrast, saw footwear as a mark of civilisation and gave soldiers left-and-right boots with riveted insoles, their decoration signalling rank. Later Greek fashions coded status, with pure white shoes for brides and soles carved to print messages in the dust.
Medieval Catalan peasants wore jute-soled espadrilles from the 13th century, and pointed shoes stretched up to 61 centimetres, their toes stuffed with moss or wool. The 15th-century Crakow's long polaine was sometimes tied to the knee with whalebone, and pattens of the same era foreshadowed high heels. In China, foot binding spread from about AD 960, survived bans by the Mongols and Manchus, and was finally enforced out of existence under Mao in 1949.
Sewn-on soles became standard for leather shoes from the 17th century, yet until about 1800 many were straights, identical for either foot. Shoemaking was a cottage trade in the mid-18th century and almost entirely mechanised by 1900. Today roughly nine in ten pairs end up in landfill because their mixed materials are hard to separate or recycle.
Source: Shoe
