Who Wore High-Heeled Shoes First?

Although shoes with high heels are often coded feminine in modern culture, men wore them first -- military men, specifically. Learn the history of high heels in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff Lauren boge obam here. Although these days wearing
shoes with high heels is mostly coded feminine, the original
wears of high heels were men. So what's the history here? When, where,
and why did people first begin wearing shoes with elevated heels.

(00:23):
We spoke via email with Elizabeth Semmelhawk, senior curator at
Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum, who says she has yet to
unravel this mystery. The exact origin of high heels remains
to be discovered. What's clear, however, is that high heels
were not a European invention. Heeled footwear only emerged in
Western Europe around the turn of the seventeenth century, but

(00:44):
had been warned for hundreds of years prior throughout Western Asia.
Similhawks said evidence for early Western Asian heels as far
back as tenth century Persia suggests a strong relationship to
horseback riding and may have been connected to the innovation
of the stirrup. The store Up family changed horseback riding
and in particular made military campaigns on horseback more effective,

(01:04):
as it enabled riders to study themselves and dramatically improved
the effective use of weapons such as the lance and
bow and arrow. The heel seems to have been a
further development of this technology, as it allowed the wearer
to hook his feet in the stirrups that are anchoring
him to his steed. Eventually, healed footwear for men spread
to Europe, likely through political networks and trade, but the

(01:26):
exact evolution is complicated. So why did heel's only become
of interest to Europeans around the beginning of the sixteen hundreds,
Semmelhack said The answer lies in things as complex as
European world exploration and the destabilizing of the textile trade,
to the rise of Persia under the reign of shah
Abbus the first from fight to sixteen twenty nine, and

(01:47):
both Persian and European concerns about the increasingly powerful Ottoman Empire.
In particular, it was the power of shot a Bus,
the first Mountain military who wore healed footwear, that may
have made heels appealing first to European men and ultimately
to women. As the heel entered into upper classmen's fashion,
there was a concurrent trend in women's fashion to adopt

(02:07):
certain aspects of men's attire. Samahawks said that the women
who played with this trend were often quote the butt
of ridicule, and their numerous offenses included their adoption of
men's military inspired fashion, including broad brimmed hats, ornamented with plumes, doublets,
carrying weapons, and wearing heels. The heels that both men
and women wore in the early years of the seventeenth

(02:29):
century were very low, but they would rise for both
sexes as the century progressed. The majority of powerful and
privileged men wore heels through the seventeenth century and into
the early eighteenth century. In France, during the reign of
Louis the fourteenth from sixteen forty three to seventeen fifteen,
wearing red high heels was a principal signifier of political privilege,

(02:50):
limited to the king and his courtiers. Beyond France, red
heels for men were at first associated with French sophistication,
but by the end of the seventeenth century they were
increasing he seen as a feminate, especially in England, Samahawks said,
fueled by nascent Enlightenment thinking and increasing nationalisms, men's dress
began to undergo a radical transformation at the end of

(03:11):
the seventeenth century. It was in the early eighteenth century
that men abandoned the heel to women's fashions and the
heel became a signifier of femininity. Those shifts included a
heightened division between men's and women's attire, as well as
march differences between French and English men's dress. Samahawk said
since the seventeenth century, Western culture has shown extreme sensitivity

(03:33):
to men in heels, especially if it's deemed that the
heels are being used to increase height. She notes that
this negative view only increased when Darwinian ideas of survival
of the fittest became translated into racist and sexist notions
of natural male physical and mental superiority. But heels for
men made a brief comeback in the middle of the

(03:54):
twentieth century. Samahak explained the heel began rising in men's
fashion in the nineteens sixties, and in the early nineteen
seventies it reached unprecedented heights in direct response, I feel,
to the burgeoning women's movement. The heels and men's fashion, however,
were not borrowed from the female wardrobe. They were blocky
and high like Louis the fourteenth and were touted as
a way of increasing one stature, masculinity, and confidence. In

(04:18):
no way did they reference the long standing feminine high
and thin heel. These days, however, heels on men can
be construed to emphasize a lack of height rather than
compensating for it, which means quote that heals on men
function like a bad to pay. They reveal insecurity, and
that in our current culture is deemed unappealing. Iconic footwear

(04:41):
designer Christian Lubaton concurred to a news publication a man
in heels. That's a prosthesis. But I sympathize the men
need help, But a man in heels is ridiculous. Clearly
Mr Lubaton doesn't watch the Cowboy channel. Those bronch and
bull writers look pretty good. Or, as semel Hack puts it,
cowboys continue to own their heels and wear them with confidence.

(05:09):
Today's episode was written by Carrie Tatro and produced by
Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots
of other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works
dot com and for our podcast to My Heart radio,
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