“To understand shoes,” writes history professor Matthew McCormack, “we need to think about them as worn objects: material articles that interact with the bodies that wear them.” Shoes, especially worn and broken-in ones, can reveal a great deal about the lives of people in the past—how they moved, what their bodies were able to do, and the roles they played in society. In this Aeon essay, McCormack explores how footwear throughout history not only reflected social and physical realities, but also shaped them.
For this reason, worn historic shoes are more interesting than pristine ones. They are one category of museum artefact where curators prefer imperfect examples, and tend not to mend or restore them. It is better to put a dilapidated shoe on display than a new one, since it has more stories to tell. A new shoe might be pleasant to look at, but ultimately it tells you only about the object itself, whereas the dilapidated shoe tells us about the life of a historic human being.
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