10 pairs of dirty, fetishistic and fashionable shoes
Gold platform shoes from the 70s. Photo: Alamy
"In a world ruled by ideal economic conditions... there will be no sensible shoes," 1920s shoe designer André Perugia once said. We're all wearing comfortable, sexless sneakers now, so draw your own conclusions. Luckily, history has plenty of crazy shoes on hand to keep us entertained while we wonder where all our money went.
Paleoanthropologists can tell from the feet when we started wearing shoes regularly: the toe bones became spindler about 40,000 years ago. Most of that footwear was too organic to survive. The oldest known example is a pair of ...