Although it’s common knowledge that shoes were invented primarily as a way to protect us from the elements, they certainly have developed into a stylish appendage as their four hundred year history has marched on. It must be amazing for the modern shoe buyer to realize when they’re looking through the site at a modern online store like OneGoodPair that the history of shoes goes back a lot further than that attractive modern pair of Clarks Wallabees Cedar Brown Leather would have them believe.

However, it’s true. Over the centuries, footwear has taken on very different forms and some of these have been driven by a sense of fashion once the primary goals of staying warm and dry were looked after. It should be no surprise to any student of history that the shoe was first named by the Greeks and then later the Romans and it was these Romans who provided the basis for many of our modern day comfortable shoes designs like the ones you can see online at OneGoodPair.com.

Of course footwear today has evolved to the point where it is vastly different among the sexes as evidenced by the Clarks Wallabees Privo Women’s Joba Chocolate, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a time in the evolution of footwear where shoes looked pretty much the same for men or women. Generally all the footwear up until the fourteenth century was flat soled with almond-shaped toes.

Here’s another surprise. Two hundred years later there was a movement toward making dressy shoes for the different sexes look distinct but it wasn’t women who started this trend. It was during the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth century that men took to exploring new dimensions in the width of their footwear. The history of footwear has not always been one of peaceful evolution either.

There have been several periods where the Church got involved and condemned some of the styles that early fashion designers came up with as depraved and dissolute. Still, it wasn’t until four hundred years ago that the distinction between classes started to break down and the sense of fashionable shoes started to filter down to the masses. Historians have actually been able to save a quantity of attractive dress shoes starting from this period. It seems that these articles of clothing were so cherished that they started to be passed down from generation to generation starting at that time.