Would you ever run a marathon barefoot?
Would you believe us if we told you that a man completed a 26.2 mile long
Olympic marathon barefoot AND finished in first place?
More on that later.
To the modern privileged human, footwear is a given.
However, it wasn’t always this way.
But why do we wear shoes?
Well, because it would be ridiculous to be walking around barefoot
in the cold Finnish Lapland
or the dirty streets of New York City, of course.
But shoes nowadays have gone beyond fulfilling practical purposes.
Do we actually need a pair of red bottom Louboutins for that wedding
or the latest Yeezy’s to survive?
Probably not.
But that certainly hasn’t stopped artists from giving shoutouts
to their favorite kicks in their songs.
You’re watching Explore Mode and today we are diving into
the history and origin of shoes.
The first evidence of footwear can be found in the remains of
two humans that lived more than 40,000 years before us.
In 2008, researchers recovered
human skeletons from Tianyuan Cave, a now popular
archaeological site near Beijing.
They didn’t find actual shoes, but what they did find
were strong bone legs with slim toe bones
which suggest that these humans protected their feet
with some sort of footwear.
Evidence of shoes can also be found in ancient artwork.
15,000-year-old paintings on the walls
inside the Cave of Altamira in Spain
show hunters wearing boots made of animal leather and fur.
The earliest physical evidence of actual shoes
was found in 1938 by anthropologist
Luther Cressman inside Fort Rock Cave, Oregon.
Inside the cave, Cressman discovered dozens of
sandals made of twined shredded sagebrush bark.
But humans didn’t just use sandals for everything.
The first leather shoe is a 5,500-year-old
moccasin-like slipper found in Armenia in 2008
called the Areni-1 shoe.
Then we have the first hiking shoes.
They were found in the Otztal Alps between Austria and Italy on the feet of none other
than Otzi the Iceman.
The tip of his 5,000-year-old shoes and their soles were made of leather,
put together by braided dry grass
and lined with hay for insulation.
But as humans settled down in different parts of the world
and civilizations grew,
so did the need for different kinds of footwear.
The now popular moccasin finds its origins in native
communities in North America.
The first moccasins were made of leather or bison hides
and were typically adorned with colorful beads.
Moccasins were great for keeping your feet warm,
but not good for keeping them dry,
so during rainy weather and warm seasons people would just go barefoot.
But the shoes that transcended civilizations were not the moccasins or boots.
It was the thong sandal.
That’s right, the great-grandparent of the flip-flop.
We can see ancient Egyptians wearing them in murals that date back to
4,000 BCE.
They were also sported by ancient Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and
African civilizations
— all of which had their own versions made of different materials.
But not everyone thought the sandal was all that.
The Greeks not only saw no need for
the sandal, they actually preferred to go sans shoes.
Just take a look at statues of Greek gods or athletes:
not a single one is wearing shoes
and many are partial if not completely nude.
Athletes who took part in the Ancient Olympic Games
are widely known to have participated barefoot
and naked.
But centuries after these great Greek runners competed in the early races,
runner Abebe Bikila from
Ethiopia won two gold medals for Olympic
marathon running, one of which he completed barefoot.
In the summer of 1960
at 5:30 p.m.,
Olympic athletes were gathering in Italy’s Campidoglio square
getting ready to run 26.2 miles around Rome.
But there was one thing that bothered Bikila about the race:
His shoes.
Back in Ethiopia, Bikila was used to running completely barefoot,
so on the day of the race, he decided that that’s how he would compete
Bikila was not expected to win,
but at 18 miles, he was already leading the race,
competing against a Moroccan runner named Rhadi Ben Abdesselam
for the top spot.
In the end, Bikila managed to overrun Abdesselam,
making him the first black African man to win an Olympic medal.
In 1964, Bikila would join the race again
for the Tokyo Olympics.
He won his second gold medal that summer
only this time,
wearing shoes.
The origin of the high heel isn’t as glamorous
as we’d like to think.
The earliest predecessor of what is now seen as the footwear
equivalent of femininity was a chunky
was a chunky wooden platform called
the patten.
Pattens came to be in Europe during the Middle Ages
and lasted up until the early 20th century.
They were, essentially, shoes for your shoes.
See, shoes in the Middle Ages didn’t do much
to protect your feet
so in order to avoid staining your shoes with mud or human
and animal excrement,
you had to wear these wooden platforms.
Being able to wear pattens was also seen as a status symbol,
as slaves often had to trudge through
mud and other fluids barefoot.
Heels as a fashion statement were brought to Western Europe
after a Persian diplomatic mission visited several
European courts at the end of the 16th Century.
Persian soldiers used them to safely secure their feet in stirrups
but Europeans decided they would give them a twist.
Unlike pattens,
European heels weren’t designed with practicality in mind.
They were meant to be an extravagant status symbol.
Only people who could afford not to move around too much
could wear them and so they became popular among European socialites.
In fact, in France, there were actually policies
in place that determined how high your heels could be
depending on your level of nobility.
Commoners could only wear half-inch high heels,
middle-class folks could wear one-inch heels,
knights wore heels one and a half inches high,
nobles wore two-inch high-heels
and princes wore two and a half high-heels.
By the late 1700s,
heels became outmoded for men
and started to become more related to feminine fashion.
The famed red bottoms of Christian Louboutin heels
have become one of the most iconic fashion items
of the 21st Century with many pop stars
dedicating a verse or two to their favorite pair of
Louboutin pumps.
But red bottom shoes aren’t a thing of the present,
they were introduced to the French court in 1673
by King Louis XIV.
Louis XIV only allowed people within his close circle of
noblemen and women to wear red-soled shoes,
clearly marking their rank and social standing among royalty.
It didn’t take long for this trend to catch on in other European countries
and so the red heels and soles became a way to flaunt
wealth and privilege
— as it is now.
The earliest version of the common sneaker was the plimsoll.
Plimsolls were developed in the 19th Century and their
designs were very simple.
Their soles were made of rubber and the tops were simply covered with canvas fabric.
They were originally designed for the British Navy because
the rubber soles helped them walk on slippery decks.
However, they became popular among wealthy people,
who used them to play tennis, a sport that was very popular at the time.
In 1892, the United States Rubber Company
decided they would make a more comfortable
non-Navy version of the shoe and mass produce it.
Their first sneaker came out in 1917,
they named them
Keds
You might have heard of them before.
Marquis Mills Converse, owner of the Converse Rubber Shoe Company,
developed the first sneaker created especially for playing basketball
that same year.
He named them Converse All-Stars.
You might have heard of these too.
In 1923 a German cobbler and inventor called
Adolf “Adi” Dassler
created a sneaker that would go global.
His company?
Adidas.
Oh, and his older brother, Rudolf Dassler?
He was the founder of Puma.
But before they opened separate companies, the Dasslers were a team.
Time for an Express Explore Explanation.
Start the clock.
Before Adolf and Rudolf Dassler founded separate sportswear companies,
they were business partners.
Adolf was the craftsman behind the shoes’ designs
and Rudolf focused on business.
The company was called the Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory.
They caught the eye of the international community at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
Adolf cleverly approached American sprint star Jesse Owens
with a suitcase full of spikes designed by the Dasslers
and somehow convinced him to compete in them.
Luckily for the Dassler brothers, Owens went on to win 4 gold medals
while sporting their shoes.
Both brothers joined the party and
began supplying its youth movement with footwear.
When the war broke out, production was heavily constricted
and soon after both brothers were called to serve the party
further cutting down production.
After the end of the war,
tensions that had already been building up between the brothers
during the war finally exploded.
The once fruitful partnership parted ways,
creating their own companies: Adidas and Puma.
But although Keds, Converse, Adidas, and Puma were the early pioneers of the sneaker,
it’s an Oregonian brand that currently takes the top spot
in the sneaker industry with a brand value of $15 billion
Nike.
The company was founded by a track-and-field coach-athlete duo in 1964
and was originally called Blue Ribbon Sports.
Through the 70s and 80s, Nike steadily expanded its sportswear
but the brand truly got its big break in 1984,
after it signed a collaboration deal with none other
than NBA star Michael Jordan.
It’s been 35 years since this iconic collaboration happened,
but Nike’s Jordans line continues to expand
and revolutionize the sneaker in the 21st Century.
In January this year, the company unveiled its first hyper-adaptive
self-lacing shoes called E.A.R.L
for Electric Adaptable Reaction Lacing.
We’ve certainly come a long way,
from wearing sandals made of dry grass
to developing shoes that will fit perfectly to the contour of our feet.
It may take a long time for new technologies to become available for everyone,
but in the meantime,
we just have to take it one step at a time.
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