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I moved this blog to a semi-retired status a couple of years ago, without realizing that I was abandoning the very active community of posters associated with Elliotts shoes. Apologies to all the people whose comments piled up in the ‘unapproved’ file! You are now posted on the blog and I will do a better job of updating.

And, as a shameless plug, if you find this blog interesting you can still purchase Made for Walking at Amazon! Lots of good stuff in there that you won’t find on the blog.

Sample page from Made for Walking, Andy Peake, 2018. Schiffer Fashion Press

God, it’s been a long time since I last posted on this blog. There have been many occasions when I really thought I would. This year, for example, was the 10th anniversary of the most recent return of the over-the-knee boot, beginning a sustained run of popularity that continues through today. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the return of what used be called the “baggy boot” back in the mid/late nineteen seventies, now reborn as the “slouchy boot.” Like its late seventies precursor, it’s a serious investment; the average pair seems to run well over $500, with many being in the four-figure range. Most recently Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, turned up in a pair of $895 FRAME x Tamara Mellon boots, which gained her plaudits from the Daily Telegraph; they were no small investment, the paper noted, “so it’s safe to assume that she thinks she’ll get lots of wear out of them in years to come.”

You would assume that such a news item would provide an opportunity to revisit the golden days of 1975, when this style was so popular that the New York Times‘ Bernadine Morris reported that, “popular booteries, such as Renast on the Rue Tronchet, hand out tickets to women standing in line on the sidewalk, as if they were selling meat or pastry.” But if you want to read that story, I fear you’ll have to buy the book. I’ve run out of steam.

All things have a lifetime, and this blog has been going for six years now. Along the way I got great input and comments from a number of people, spawned a book, and provided a forum for the employees of the much-loved (and much-missed) London shoe store, Elliotts. And now I’m done. The fashion boot, emphatically, is not. Long may it continue to walk, into the next century and beyond.

Selected references:

• Abraham, Tamara, 2019. Slouch boots are back – here’s how to wear them this winter. Daily Telegraph, Nov 4, 2019. Retrieved Nov 7, 2019.
• Abraham, Tamara, 2019. The Duchess of Sussex delivers a masterclass in separating forever styles from flash-in-the-pan trends. Daily Telegraph, Nov 7, 2019. Retrieved Nov 7, 2019.
• Morris, Bernadine, 1975. Hemmed up. New York Times, May 3, 1977; p.52.
• Peake, Andy, 2018. Made for Walking: a Modest History of the Fashion Boot. Schiffer Fashion Press, 192pp.

OK, I’ll admit it. The title of this post has very little to do with its subject. But I couldn’t resist including a quote from The Princess Bride. Vizzini’s riposte to his giant henchman, Fezzik, is just one of a thousand quotable moments from William Goldman’s script, and if you’ve never seen it you should go rent it now.

Having got that out of the way, the one thing that the title does have to do with the post contents is Greenland. For more than a thousand years, that enormous Arctic island and its indigenous peoples have had an association with Denmark, a country that I visited for the first time a few days ago. The association has not always been a happy one, something that is explored in a great exhibit at the National Museum in Copenhagen. And it was in that exhibit that I came across a fascinating story that lies right at the intersection of the the history of fashion boots and my day job as a museum curator, where I often have to unpack thorny issues of cultural sensitivity.

Peter Jensen is a well respect fashion designer, born in Denmark but now based in London. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Design in Copenhagen before moving to Britain to do an MA at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, which he finished in 1999. The fashion press has variously described his clothes as “quirkily humorous” (Vogue), “a breath of fresh air” (WWD), “visually and conceptually captivating” (i-D), and “witty, pretty, proudly individual and imaginative in the extreme” (The Independent). Not at all the sort of the work that might elicit death threats. And yet, in 2009, Jensen found himself in hot water because of a pair of boots.

Or, to be more precise, several pairs of boots that formed part of his Fall 2009 Ready to Wear collection. Jensen intended the collection to pay homage to his Aunt Jytte, who, he stated, “owned a chip shop and cab company in the capital of Nuuk, Greenland, and liked fashion in the seventies.” He dedicated the collection to her “because the Danish government paid for me to go to Greenland and the Faeroe Islands to research.” On the catwalk, this played out in traditional  cross-stitch patterns, beaded capes, blanket plaids layered with padded jackets, woolly double-bobble hats, and white miniskirts (the latter much beloved of Aunt Jytte in her youth). But one of the most striking aspects of the show were models’ boots: white, leather and thigh-high, with a flowery band around the top.

The boots were inspired by the kamik, a thigh-high boot of reindeer (caribou) skin or sealskin that forms part of the traditional costume of the indigenous population of Greenland. The kamik is one of a wider group of boots that are also known as mukluks. They are worn by Arctic aboriginal peoples such as the Inuit, Iñupiat, and Yupik; they are lightweight, flexible, and – critically – breathable. Air exchange is an advantage in extremely cold conditions, where perspiration may become a factor in frostbite. Mukluks are so effective that today the design is widely used for the industrial manufacture of cold-weather boots.

In the blog of the Penn Museum, Elizabeth Peng writes that “kamiks are imbued with cultural significance: the construction and decoration communicate the maker’s lineage, abilities, gender, chosen activity, and even regional relationships.” Peng quotes Ulayok Kaviok, an Inuit elder from Nunatsiavut, Canada who describes the making of a pair of kamiks as a moment of generational transfer. “During the skin boot production process, elders pass on oral traditions to young seamstresses who are interested in traditional rituals and sharing systems. The first pair of skin boots sewn by a young sibling is a symbol of her bond with the traditional lifestyle and the importance of sharing Inuit and Inuvialuit culture.”

When you realize how much meaning is imbued in a pair of kamiks, it’s perhaps understandable that there were some people in Greenland who were deeply upset by Jensen’s slimline, high-heeled boot designs. As reported in the Guardian, 40 women took to the streets of Nuuk in an official protest against the designer. If that doesn’t seem like many people, consider that the entire population of Greenland is only around 56,000. Scale that up to the size of the USA population, and you’d be talking about a couple of hundred thousand people. So for Greenlanders it was a big deal.

In a press statement, the protesters announced that their short term goal was “to stop these fake kamiks from coming out on the retail market… The Greenlandic people who are opposed to these fake kamiks will not stop until justice has been completed. Anyone can see that Peter Jensen’s kamiks are directly copied from the Greenlandic women’s national costume kamiks, which in Greenlandic is called “KAMISAT”… This is a violation of our collective rights. We have the legal authority to pursue this case, and we intend to do so! … If we imagine a businessman coming up with a product made from rapeseed oil in the original wrapper for LURPAK butter… Isn’t it a blasphemy of a Danish national product? (…) In protest against the theft of others’ culture!”

Jensen was horrified by the reaction, which even included a death threat. “I am shocked that our loving tribute to Kamik boots and beadwork capes could be construed as in any way exploitative,” he said in a statement. “We hoped to bring the world’s attention to the beauty of the Greenlandic national costume. We hoped that the people of Greenland would embrace the attention their heritage has received. The collection and the boots were made out of pure love and meant as a celebration. That I am now getting death threats is really taking this thing out of proportion.”

There’s a curious irony to this story. As I’ve discussed in my book, one of the most fascinating aspect of women’s fashion boots is that they take a traditionally masculine form of dress, imbued with a certain type of power, and co-opt that power to their own ends. People in 1963 were a little shocked by Saint Laurent’s thighboots for women, and the growing popularity of boots during the sixties was part of a wider cultural phenomenon whereby women began to emerge from the shadow of male dominance to make their own way in the world. Cooption was part and parcel of liberation. But for the indigenous people of Greenland, Jensen’s actions looked very much like cultural appropriation. The fact that he was Danish by birth meant that some people saw the dynamic as being that of the oppressor taking from the oppressed.

But perhaps things are not so clear-cut. In a thoughtful piece for the Visit Greenland website, the Greenlandic artist Jørgen Chemnitz argued that the protests against the boot and the wider indignation at its creation were “clear examples of the reactionary forces that prevail amongst those to whom traditions are static and should be handed down as they are without being allowed to develop.” Chemnitz went on to argue that “the Greenlandic national costume is actually an imaginatively put together amalgam of new and old materials from all corners of the globe: sealskin, pearls, silks.”

Image Sources:

• Top – composite catwalk images of Peter Jensen’s 2009 Ready to Wear collection; Vogue.com
• Bottom – West Greenlandic women in traditional costume featuring kamiks; Greenland Today

Selected References:

• Chemnitz, Jørgen. “Deconstructing the Greenlandic National Costume.” Visit Greenland. Retrieved June 11, 2019
• Holmes, Rachel. “Designer Death Threats.” The Guardian, online edition, March 26, 2009. Retrieved June 11, 2019
• Peng, Elizabeth. “Fashion, Fur, Flowers, and Flannel.” Penn Museum Blog, May 12, 2015. Retrieved June 11, 2019

 

 

 

My day job seems to absorb more and more of my time, leaving me with little space for side projects like this blog, but I have tried to keep in touch with the fall ready-to-wear collections, at least from the narrow focus of what use designers are making of boots this year. And there were plenty of them, from ankle to thigh-high, and from Alberto Ferritti to Zuhair Murad. There were towering mock-croc thighboots at Max Mara and seventies-style platforms at Longchamp. But the one that garnered all the attention, and not just from me, was Hedi Slimane’s collection for Celine, a time machine taking us straight back to 1977/78, with pleated, knee-length skirts, horse-bit belts, white silk blouses, blazers, capes, and culottes. There were also glossy knee-length high-heeled boots, thigh-high boots over skinny jeans, and even sheepskin lined thighboots of the sort once sported by Kate Bush. Writing for Vogue, Sarah Mower described it as typical of the bourgeois French girl’s wardrobe throughout the ’70s and ’80s, but it could equally have been seen in Britain or America at the same time. It’s exactly the relaxed, countrified look typical of the second half of the nineteen seventies, which I discussed in an earlier post, “baggy boots” and all.

In the Daily Telegraph, Hannah Rochell pointed out that this “long skirt, tall boots” look has actually been around on the posts of various social media influencers since the fall of last year, suggesting that Slimane’s work was perhaps not as newsworthy as the mainstream fashion press was suggesting, although no less desirable for that. Meanwhile, I found myself wondering when was the last time that culottes teamed with knee-length boots were popular. My guess is that it’s been a good 40 years.

Image Source:

• Vogue.com

References:

• Mower, Sarah. Celine Fall 2019 Ready-to-Wear Collection. Vogue.com, Mar 1, 2019
• Rochell, Hannah. Why the latest Celine collection is already old news on Instagram. Daily Telegraph, Mar 7, 2019

 

Last month we lost Karl Lagerfeld, at the grand old age of 85, still going strong as a designer up to the end. Lagerfeld features heavily in Made for Walking: his 1977 collection for Chloe, which featured swashbuckling over-the-knee boots inspired by Federico Fellini’s Casanova; his 1982 collection for the same company, which combined narrow skirts with tall, low-heeled boots to create the impression that the women were wearing pants; the loose-fitting, high heeled suede boots of his 1985 Fendi collection; his iconic 1991 biker boot for Chanel. But perhaps my favorite, by far, was his 1990 haute couture collection for Chanel. In a cheeky homage to Coco Chanel’s famous dislike of knees, Lagerfeld combined massive, opulent ballgowns with thigh-high satin boots (above). He described the look as “Madonna meets Jayne Wrightsman,” in a nod to the latter’s renowned collection of decorative arts of the ancien régime. Lagerfeld was, in the words of his New York Times obituary, one of the first examples of the designer as shape shifter, “the creative force who lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its sartorial semiology and then pulls it into the present with a healthy dose of disrespect and a dollop of pop culture.”

Image Source:

• Rock ‘n Royalty. Vogue 180.10, Oct 1, 1990: pp. 328-329 via Evolution Revolution

References:

• Karl Lagerfeld, Designer Who Defined Luxury Fashion, Is Dead. New York Times, Feb 19, 2019.
• Anon. Chloeallure: Beautiful Costumes from The Dressing-Up Box. Vogue UK, Sept 1977: pp.126-129
• Morris, Bernadine. At Lagerfeld’s Paris show, the 18th Century goes modern. New York Times, Mar 29, 1977: pg.41.
• Morris, Bernadine. St Laurent: No Fuss, Just Style. New York Times, April 1, 1982: pg. C8.
• Morris, Bernadine. Fall Sportswear: A Wide Range of Themes. New York Times, May 3, 1985, pB10
• Morris, Bernadine. Paris in Perspective: Outdoors to Outrageous. New York Times, July 31, 1990: pg. B6
• Hochswedder, Woody, Reporter’s Notebook: In Paris, Ghastly Music and Frye Boots. New York Times, Mar 21, 1991: Pg. C10

 

The Holiday season is almost past, but I wanted to push out at least one short, but seasonally appropriate post to make up for the long hiatus on this blog. As you’ll have gathered by now, I’m happy to scavenge any potential source of information to unwrap the history of the fashion boot and in the run-up to Christmas I stumbled on a new one.

American readers will almost certainly be familiar with the Radio City Rockettes, a precision dance company that has been performing at the Radio City Music Hall in New York since 1932. The Radio City Christmas Spectacular is as much a part of the Holidays as Santa Claus and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.

As it happens, the Rockettes had a long tradition of celebrating the recruitment of dancers for the Christmas Show by getting them to do a kick line for the press cameras. In the past, they often did this in their street clothes, which, given the time of year, often included boots. And if you dig around on the web for a while, you can find these.

Included here are four photos from 1970, 1976, 1977, and 1978. It’s a bit of a cheat, because they’re not all from the same type of event; the ’76 picture is a press image from a tour to San Francisco, while the ’78 one is a picket line when the Rockettes were protesting the threatened closure of Radio City. But let’s ignore those inconvenient details and focus on what the photos actually show.

If you look along the kickline for 1970 it’s pretty much as you’d expect (assuming you’ve been following this blog and/or reading the book); close-fitting boots, low-heeled, some rising above the knee. The line is very long and the resolution is none too great, but I’d take a guess that about 1 in 3 of the dancers is in boots. By 1976, that number is just shy of 50%; the heels are of the higher, stacked variety and there’s now a mix of the straight-legged, “baggy” boots with the calf-hugging ones. Jump forward a year and we still have an almost 50:50 split of shoes and boots. The boots are now almost all straight legged and the heels, while still high, are beginning to acquire a taper.

But the most interesting picture is from 1978, where we have a pretty much 100% showing for boots. This is understandable, given that the photo was obviously taken during a snowstorm, but the mix of styles very definitely reflects some trends that would become important moving on into the the nineteen eighties – more calf- and ankle-length boots; a greater emphasis on loose-fitting, casual styles; and boots worn under pants.

Some of this is undoubtably the fault of the weather (check out the long, down coats, for example), but as we’ve seen in earlier posts, the late seventies saw both diversification of styles and a shift towards lower heels and shorter leg lengths. By the mid 1980s, these would completely replace the higher legged, high heeled boots of the seventies and those styles would not return to popularity for another decade.

Image Sources:

1970, 1977, 1978: Rockettes.com

1976: Coots Imagery @ ebay.com

 

But not the end of the road, I hope. I haven’t managed a post for six months, largely because of having to manage a major project in my ‘day job’ as a museum curator. That will be an ongoing situation for the next few years, and makes blogging a bit of a challenge. I had almost decided to call it a day on the “Made for Walking” blog – the book is published now; it’s selling, but I did wonder – as all authors do from time to time – whether anyone really cared. And maybe it was time to cast about for a new project.

Then, a few weeks ago, I ‘outed’ myself to a couple of friends who knew nothing about this project, giving them copies of the book to read. I’d expected polite enthusiasm, but it turned out they really liked it. They had a ton of questions, all of which were excellent, and provided me with a woman’s perspectives on the topic that (with the exception of my wife) I’d been lacking. They wanted more. They were kind about my insights, but felt I should have talked to more women. One of them was so enthusiastic that she went straight home and texted me photos of all the boots in her closet. It was a fascinating conversation, and I came away stoked and energized to write more.

So thank you, Mary and Shana – I am going to blog some more, albeit sporadically. And you can expect the first of these in 2019. Happy New Year!

Sometimes you spend a while wondering whether to write a particular blog post. This is one of them. It’s darker than usual – skip it if you’re not in the mood.

I’m not generally a true crime person, but I recently finished reading “One of Your Own,” (2010), Carol Ann Lee’s biography of Myra Hindley. Her name may not be familiar to readers outside the UK, but in the 1960s Hindley and her lover, Ian Brady, committed a series of murders that shocked Britain and the world. The five victims, who ranged in age from 10 to 17 years old, were buried on moorland overlooking the city of Manchester, and so the two culprits became known as the Moors Murderers.

Hindley and Brady were sentenced to life in prison in 1966, and they spent the rest of their lives there. Had they been caught just a few years earlier, they almost certainly would have hung for their crimes, but as it happened, the bill abolishing capital punishment in the UK was passed shortly before their trial. I was born a few months after this and have no direct memory of the TV coverage, but, even decades later, my mother would shudder when she recalled the events of those years in the mid-sixties. For many people, the Moors Murders represented a loss of innocence that went hand-in-hand with the wider social changes of the time.

Some of these changes have already been discussed in this blog, and are covered in more detail in the book of Made for Walking, but by now you may be wondering what a pair of sadistic child murderers have to do with the generally sunny subject matter of this blog. The answer is that, in reading the book, I was struck by a comment made regarding Hindley. In 1963, as her relationship with Brady intensified, people who knew her began to notice a change in her appearance. The peroxide blonde hairdo, instantly recognizable from her arrest photographs, was the most obvious one. But she also adopted new styles of clothing; ditching pencil skirts and ballet pumps for short skirts, tight trousers, leather jackets. And knee-length boots.

What struck me was how many times this observation came up, in different books, and from different eye-witnesses. In one sense, it’s not surprising. One of the peculiarities of Brady and Hindley was that after the murders had taken place they would revisit the graves of their victims on the moors and pose for (seemingly innocent) photographs. Those photos became a key piece of evidence that enabled police to recover some of the victims’ bodies. And in one of the most infamous images, Hindley, holding her dog wrapped in her coat, kneels above what turned out to be the grave of 12 year-old John Kilbride. She is wearing slim-fitting trousers, tucked into low-heeled black leather knee boots.

The two murderers had developed a shared fascination with Nazis, and Brady had an obsession with the female concentration camp guard Irma Grese, who was tried and executed in 1945 for her sadistic abuse and murder of prisoners. Grese was notorious for wearing high jackboots during her time at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen; Hindley took to carrying a photograph of her in her handbag, and may, bizarrely, have been trying to use Grese as some sort of ghoulish style icon to please Brady.

1963 was the year when fashion boots for women first began to attract widespread attention. So you could argue that Myra Hindley was merely reflecting the cutting edge of style at that time. But popularity in the fashion press does not necessarily equate to widespread acceptability. If you were riding the bus in the mid-1960s, it’s likely that you and most of your fellow passengers would be dressed in clothes that would not have looked out of place ten years earlier. Clearly there was something about Hindley’s dress that really bothered her contemporaries, albeit that the comments originated after her crimes were exposed. As already mentioned, the references to the boots turn up in multiple books, and from multiple sources.

In the chapter on boots in the massively encyclopedic fashion volume A Century of Shoes (1997), the claim is made that the gap in the history of the fashion boot from the Russian boots of the 1920s to the early fashion boots of the late 1950s was because tall boots became too closely associated with fascism during the 1930s and 40s. I’d always been a little skeptical about this comment, but I now wonder whether there wasn’t something in it. Hindley would have been too young to remember the war first hand, but many of her older acquaintances in Manchester were old enough that the memories were still quite fresh. Perhaps blonde hair and black leather awakened some uncomfortable chilling recollections.

References:

• Lee, Carol Ann. 2010. One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley. Edinburgh, Mainstream Press.
• Pattison, Angela, and Cawthorne, Nigel. 1997. A Century of Shoes: Icons of Style in the 20th Century. New Jersey, Chartwell Books.
• Williams, Emlyn. 1992. Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and Its Detection. London, Pan Macmillan.

From the Bata Shoe Museum “Brides in Ratiskovice, a Moravian community located in the region of Slovacko, spent long hours embroidering the outfits that they would wear on their wedding day. One of the features of this costume was a short skirt under which were worn a pair of showy boots with deeply pleated shafts and decoratively embroidered uppers. For the wedding, a gold coin was slipped into the boot as a means of ensuring future prosperity.”

Reference:

• Bata Shoe Museum Facebook Page, June 13, 2018

Image Sources:

• Bata Shoe Museum
• Pinterest

“Made for Walking” is officially published and available for sale on Amazon! You can also get a copy directly from Schiffer Publishing. Here’s a sample of what’s in store…

—————–

As she walked around the streets of Manhattan, Beth Levine had become used to the calls from passing drivers, invariably male. It was always along the same lines: they would lean out of their cars and shout something like –

“Hey, where’s your horse?”

The attention was not surprising, because the sight of a woman in the heart of the city wearing skirts or dresses with knee-length boots was an unusual one for the late nineteen fifties. But Levine didn’t mind. She saw it as a tribute to the boots she loved to design and wear. She was no stranger to skepticism, amusement, or in some cases outright ridicule. Levine had spent the last five years on a quest to redefine the utilitarian boot as a fashionable shoe. It was proving to be an uphill struggle. The years since the disappearance of the Russian boot in the early thirties had not been kind to the idea of a fashionable boot for women. After a brief flirtation with stylish designs, the shoe industry had concluded that the role of the boot was overwhelmingly one of protection. This was something that the rubber rain boot did much better than the leather Russian boot.

There were some short-lived attempts to revive the idea of a fashion boot. At the end of the 1930s, there was a brief revival of interest in fashionable ankle boots for women, associated with clothing that paid homage to the so-called Romantic era. They were not worn very widely, but a number of designers included them in their collections. One of the most notable examples was André Perugia, who came up with leather button boots in black or cream that are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. But these were a rarity. For the most part, the women’s boot styles of the forties and fifties tended to be trim, ankle-length rain boots.

That had not always been the case. If you want to get a sense of what the earlier generation of rain boots for women looked like, mail order catalogs provide a useful window. The autumn/winter Kays Catalogue of 1928 shows a couple of styles of Russian boot. But by 1933, the Russian boots were gone. Instead we have two pages of rain boots. Some of these are typical Wellington boots. But the catalogue also featured “stylish” models “for city wear… extra-high shaped leg, close fitting, 1 1/2″ Cuban heels.” The leg height is 16 1/2 inches, which takes them right to the knee. And they are specifically described as “practical high-leg fashion boots“ (my emphasis); a similar pair came in two-tone rubber.

So while they may be absent from the high-end fashion press, mail order gives us a different picture; there were still knee-length fashion boots on sale in 1933. But by 1937, while Kays still offered one style of heeled and shaped-leg rain boot, most of the women’s boots featured in the catalogue the were regular “wellies.” And by 1960, all the boots shown were ankle length and, critically, were advertised as a practical option for bad weather. As far as the young and the stylish were concerned, they also had a significant image problem. For the teenage Lesley Hornby and her friends, growing up in the Northwest London suburb of Neasden, it was better to go through an entire winter with your legs frozen to the bone than wear boots. “Nobody wore boots,” Hornby, who was to become famous worldwide as sixties supermodel Twiggy, recalled. “Boots meant ankle boots, brown with a zip, the sort of things old ladies wore.”

To a large extent, this view was shared by the people that made them. Shoe manufacturers and retailers saw boots as a separate category of footwear from shoes, to be worn for protection from bad weather or for work. Unlike shoes, boots did not have to be fashionable, only practical. This was the world that Beth Levine set out to change.

References

• “Hey, Where’s Your Horse?” Hartford Courant, Jun 16, 1963: Pg.7E.
• Bergstein, Rachelle. 2012. Women from the Ankle Down. New York, Harper Perennial.
• Verin, Helene. 2009. Beth Levine Shoes. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang