Shoes Made for More Than Just Walking

The obvious question when pausing to look at the footwear that line Tozzer Library’s newest exhibition is, “These shoes were made for…walking?”

And the phrase is a fitting title for the exhibit.

The exhibit comprises approximately 60 pairs of shoes from around the world, culled from the Peabody Museum’s holdings of more than 500.

“The hardest part of the whole thing was deciding what to leave out,” says Pamela Gerardi, who curated the exhibit. The ones that did make the final cut span more than 200 years of shoemaking, three continents and a size range of 17 inches—providing a comprehensive visual survey of what people put on their feet.

One common thread of the exhibit is the changing relationship between stylistic form and practical function.

“At the beginning, only function influences form,” Gerardi says. “Then fashion gets ahold of it.”

And fashionable function can mean anything from producing a mincing step to keeping feet from touching steaming bathhouse floors, she says.

The first case in the exhibit examines the sensible shoe, including the oldest pair of shoes in the collection, moccasins found in a cave in Utah and made from the forelegs of an elk.

Gerardi describes them as “basically a footbag” and points out that they illustrate many of the features of early footwear: the lack of distinction between right and left, men’s and women’s, and sole and top.

Other displays are devoted to departures from the basics, which Gerardi terms “the long and short of fashion.” There are thick boots and delicate heels, pointed toes and towering platforms, each with its own fascinating origins.

Gerardi says a pair of Iranian Turkish slippers dating from about 1867 are her favorite items in the collection.

“I love the curl of the toes,” she says.

The shoes are gold, red and green, and the tip bends back almost the entire length.

At one point, curled toes became so exaggerated that legislation was passed setting limits by class. This particular pair measures 20 and a quarter inches from heel to toe.

Today, the average shoe length is about half that size.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Chinese lotus shoes, where the “ideal” length is about three inches.

“The fascination of smallness in feet is worldwide,” Gerardi says, “but nowhere so much as in China.”

But she says that five to five-and-a-half inches was more common, and that many tactics were used to make the foot appear smaller. The tiniest shoes may even have been just for show.

Despite its small size, the exhibit has garnered a great deal of attention.

“There’s something in our makeup that makes us need to ornament our clothes and ourselves,” Gerardi says. “And I think people are attracted to the topic of shoes especially.”

She says she hopes that one result will be a closer study of the cross-cultural characteristics of footwear.

“There are masses of work that can be done,” she says.

When asked how the exhibit came about, Gerardi says with a laugh, “It’s all Harvard Magazine’s fault.”

Three years ago, the magazine published a feature on the University’s connection to the shoe industry, according to Gerardi.

The editors requested photographs of interesting shoes to accompany the article, and the Peabody Museum scoured its collection.

“Everybody sat there looking at that table full of shoes and thought, ‘This would make a great exhibit,’” Gerardi says.