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Show "By Xidawright Dress and its history, the why and the wherefore is one of the most fascinating subjects one can pursue. For example, consider shoes, and as one famous designer puts it, "more than any other single article of dress, the shoes people wear can tell how they feel about life and what it adds up to." According to the shoe exhibit belonging to the United Shoe Machinery Corporation of Boston, styles in shoes have not shown any drastic changes during the last six or seven centuries. The variety of shoes to be seen in this exhibit is not much greater than can be found today in the models ranging from sport shoe to the extreme "style shoe." Man early discovered the advantages ad-vantages of foot covering, and the use of sandals and shoes precedes recorded history. Probably shoes originated in the East, and they were common during early Biblical days. The first mention appears in Genesis 14, where Abraham said to the King of Sodom: "I will not take from a thread even to a shoe latchet." Heels' in shoes were not of such an early origin, but there is no definite record of their origin. During Dur-ing the ninth and tenth centuries illustrations of sabots or wooden shoes, worn by the European peasants, peas-ants, show low broad heels. High heels first came into extensive ex-tensive use during the reign of Henry II of France, (1547-1559), when "ladies wore prodigious heels to their shoes, rendering them quite cloven footed. The heel is so high that the lady must literally have stood on her toes." Later, from Italy, Europe derived de-rived another peculiar type of shoe, a slipper-like foot covering mounted mount-ed on a high standard. These standards varied in height according accord-ing to the desires of the wearer, some of them measuring a good half-yard. So difficult was it to walk that few ladies ventured out without two servants to support them. |