Four Ways of Looking at a Shoe

By Bridget Nelson Monroe
Stepping out in classy and famous strides, from Argentina to the moon.
From Reader's Digest
As a Class Act
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Matthew Plexman/ © Bata Shoe Museum

1. As a Class Act
These lifts from the early 1700s were the Manolo Blahniks of their day, though at the time, high heels were by no means for women only. Louis XIV was especially enamored of towering footwear (the Louis heel was later named in his honor). Across Europe, says Elizabeth Semmelhack, curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, shoes then said more about status than gender: "You were expressing the fact that you weren't walking miles, working in the fields, or standing all day." By 1730, men had begun to abandon heels, and even women gave them up (for a bit) just after the French Revolution.
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