BOOT UP

Boot season, when the talk of snow sends most of us digging through the closet to reacquaint ourselves with our warmer footwear, is a fairly new thing.
For most of shoe history, the majority of people had only a pair or two and wore them until they fell apart. And for much of that time, those shoes were boots.
It makes sense.
If you can only afford one or two things to protect your feet, you’re going to buy (make, scrounge) the most useful thing you can get. And in any part of the world where there’s bad weather, that meant boots.
Boots started out as a status symbol in the warmer corners of the ancient world, where the Greeks, Romans, and Ancient Egyptians wore them to differentiate the important royals and generals from the barefoot lower orders.
By the Middle Ages, men were wearing high boots, and women were wearing ankle-length things we’d recognize as “shooties.” The powers-that-be were extremely serious about boot styling at the time: one of the charges that got Joan of Arc sent to the stake was that she wore male footwear: thigh-high boots.
Upper-class women who didn’t have to worry about trudging through the snow have always worn lighter, softer, and prettier shoes, sometimes with high heels (another post for another day!) but working women needed sturdy, sensible footwear.
Regency maidens and Romantic heroines were fond of sweet slippers, but their maids would have been wearing the same pair of boots until they couldn’t be repaired any more. Same with the men working in the fields or stables.
Shiny riding boots started becoming a thing for men in the 18th century, starting in military uniforms and spreading to upper class fashion. As women do with any good male style, the ladies quickly realized riding boots looked just as good on them, and they became part of the female kit, too. The guys were happy to share – from the number of portraits of women in riding gear showing off their boots, they were clearly a thing.
For pioneers and really poor people in the 19th century (and well into the 20th in some areas) it was boots or barefoot. Kids ran barefoot all summer and put on boots for school and/or cold weather. Often, the boots were hand-me-downs, with the oldest child getting a new pair, and everyone else getting the outgrown ones.
As mass-produced footwear became more common, and the growing middle classes had more money, women (and men’s) attention naturally turned to expanding the shoe collection. But people still wore boots much of the time. A good pair of boots was the start – not the cold-weather extra.
It helped that by the turn of the 20th century, standard daily shoes were more like boots anyhow. The high-button shoes we associate with this era would be boots if you wore them with a modern outfit. (Which, by the way, is a great idea!)
Many ladies even wore boots for dress-up. In some memoirs from the time, graduates wax lyrical about the white boots they wore with their lovely dresses. For some girls, those white boots were the first shoes they ever owned that weren’t plain and serviceable.
These days, you don’t have to be a Gilded Age dollar princess to have a shoe wardrobe, and however you feel about snow, bringing out the boots is still a fun way to mark the change of seasons.

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