The find of various shoes in a seventeenth-century shipwreck off the coast of the Dutch isle of Texel gave rise to questions on the part of the author, as to why the simple, totally threadbare footwear of the crew consisted of right and left shoes, whereas expensive, fashionable shoes from the same period had been made on a symmetrical last.
It is striking that the disappearance of the symmetrical last coincides with the introduction of the high heel, common in the Near East, among European fashion footwear. To date it has been presumed that it would have been both too difficult and too expensive for European shoemakers to manufacture asymmetrical shoes in different heights of heel, which would necessitate the making of two new, mirroring lasts for each pair of shoes.
Looking back at former Arabic influences on shoe fashion, for example in Spain and Italy, we see a somewhat more differentiated picture. The combination of a heel and a symmetrical sole came to be so ‘common’ that asymmetrical shoes disappeared almost entirely until the end of the nineteenth century, when right and left shoes were being made again under the influence of the Lebensform movement.
Dit artikel is Nederlandstalig en verscheen in het Jaarboek 2019 van de Nederlandse Kostuumvereniging. Bestel hier een exemplaar van het Jaarboek.
