Footwear » Shoe Triva

Roman soldiers measured the first mile--it was paced out by them in one thousand steps. They called it "mille passuum."

In the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, royal status was indicated by the quantity of beads and patterns on boots.

The Iroquois made plaited corn-husk slippers to be worn by the dead in funerary rituals.

Marie Antoinette had 500 pairs of shoes. One servant’s sole job was to catalog her shoes by color, date and style. Marie Antoinette lost her head to the revolution in 1793. After the French Revolution, the rebels outlawed the red heels of the aristocracy, which were only worn at the court of Louis XIV.

Thigh-high boots were worn for pirates to slip booty into--hence the word “bootlegging.”

The name “pump” came from the sound the shoes made when they hit the floor: poumpe, pompe or pumpe. Pumps have been the shoe choice for every first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy.

A loosened shoe suggested a loose woman in 18th century French paintings.

Dutch wooden clogs with flat bottoms were used to tamp the earth for tulip planting while the Japanese wore 3-foot-high stilted platforms to pick mandarin oranges. The French used wooden clogs with 9-inch-long serrated iron spikes to crush chestnuts to extract tannin for use in the leather industry.

Followers of the Jain religion in India followed a main tenet, which was the preservation of all life. They wore sandals designed with a sole resting on a thin-sided hollow platform which helped its wearer to avoid crushing insects underfoot.

At the height of the Victorian period, genteel women were expected to wear sweeping skirts and crinolines to hide their feet, which modesty demanded be confined in ankle-high-boots lest a glimpse of uncovered skin be revealed.

The barefoot aborigines of Australia fashioned shoes of human hair and emu feathers for their executioners to wear to disguise their footprints and protect their anonymity.

After being out of fashion for nearly 1,000 years, sandals came back into style in the 1920s.

An erect ankle and extended leg is the biological sign of sexual availability in several animal species. Both spike heels and the lotus shoe force the leg into what anthropologists call a “courtship strut.”

During his 1926 coronation, Emperor Hirohito stood on 12-inch tall getas, a thong clog with a wooden base.

In 1949, Buster Brown offered 47 variations of the basic saddle shoe.

88% of women buy shoes that are one size too small for them.

Ray Price’s song, "My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You" was a chart-topper in 1957.

The 1973 film American Graffiti sparked a short-lived revival of saddle shoes, the de rigueur high school fashion of the 1950s.

The Bata Shoe Company developed at the request of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War a prototype of a boot that had a molded sole that left the imprint of a Vietcong sandal, camouflaging the U.S. soldier's tracks.

In the Middle Ages, a father passed his authority over his daughter to her husband in a shoe ceremony. At the wedding the groom handed the bride a shoe, which she put on to show she was then his subject. In China one of the bride's red shoes is tossed from the roof to insure happiness for the bridal couple. In Hungary a groom drinks a toast to his bride out of her wedding slipper. Today in the U.S. shoes are tied to the bumper of the bridal couple's car. This is a reminder of the days when a father gave the groom one of his daughter's shoes as a symbol of a changing caretaker.

In the early 1900s, when author L. Frank Baum conceived of Dorothy's magical shoes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , they were silver. But when the film version was being written in 1939, screenwriter Noel Langley decided silver wouldn't stand out on screen. With the stroke of his pen, the ruby slippers were created. At least 6 pairs of the ruby slippers were made for the film, 4 of which survive today. One pair is on display at the Smithsonian and another at Disney MGM studios. Another pair sold at a Christie's auction for $165,000, a testament to their collectable value.

The Beatle Boot with its Cuban heel was less macho and resembled the style of boot favored by Victorian ladies.

Many presidents have worn cowboy boots: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.