When Shoes Had No Left or Right

For a surprisingly long time, a pair of shoes did not necessarily contain a left shoe and a right shoe.

They were just two shoes.

In Britain, shoemakers commonly worked from what was called a straight last. A last is the solid form a shoe is built around. Instead of making one shaped for the left foot and another for the right, the same basic form could make both.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has shoes from the nineteenth century made this way. In some cases, the wearer could do some of the final shaping simply by wearing them.

There was even a strange little choice hidden inside this system.

A pair of slippers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was made on straight lasts but marked right and left. The museum notes that the owner could keep wearing each shoe on the same foot or alternate them to spread the wear more evenly.

That is such a different relationship with a shoe.

Today we assume the shoe should arrive already knowing the foot.

Back then, sometimes the foot finished the job.

This was not because earlier shoemakers had somehow failed to notice that human feet are different. There are records from the late eighteenth century arguing that shoes should be shaped separately for each foot. Research by historian Matthew McCormack shows that right and left lasts became increasingly common after about 1790, while straight shoes continued alongside them for decades.

One proposed explanation was simple economics.

One form could do the work of two.

Then manufacturing changed.

Shoe sizes became more standardized. By the second half of the nineteenth century, machines made it easier to reproduce shoes at scale. The Smithsonian has nineteenth century sole patterns made specifically to standardize shoe sizes, a small artifact from a much larger shift in how footwear was produced.

We are not suggesting straight shoes were secretly better.

They often were not.

The interesting part is what the story reveals about design.

We tend to treat the shape of familiar objects as inevitable.

It usually is not.

A shoe can ask the foot to adapt to it.

A shoe can adapt to the foot.

Most shoes probably do some of both.

Take off your shoes and put them next to each other.

Look at how much information about the human body has already been built into their shape before you ever wear them.

The curve.

The width.

The toe.

The arch.

The difference between left and right.

None of those things simply appeared.

Someone decided how much of the foot the shoe should already know.

A shoe is partly a record of what its maker believes a foot needs.

That seems worth looking at more closely.

Sources

1. Carpet Slippers, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2. Woman’s Shoes, Philadelphia Museum of Art
3. Embodying the History of Shoes: Footwear and Gender in Britain, 1700 to 1900, Matthew McCormack
4. Set of Shoe Sole Patterns, Smithsonian National Museum of American History
5. O’Donnell Shoe Company National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, National Park Service