the danger of pointy shoes
a brief history of satan's claws
I was doing your classic Monday night SSENSE scroll (the worst app in the universe, by the way. Why are your pictures so small and hard to see???? Don’t you know I’m scrolling in the darkness, with only the light from HBO’s Industry on the projector to guide me?? Don’t you want me to purchase from your website???)
Sorry. Ahem.
I was doing your classic Monday night SSENSE scroll when I noticed a tangible shift in my taste. I was favoriting a lot of pointed-toed shoes. This may seem like nothing to a layperson or a normal person or a chill person, but to an Obsessive Fashion Girlie, a change in gravitational pull towards one aesthetic over another is a monumental event.
Like a snot-nosed kid who just learned to say, “Why?” - I found myself in Google quicksand. What’s up with pointed shoes? Are they bad for your feet? Why are cowboy boots pointed, aren’t they supposed to be practical? When did pointed shoes become a thing? For why?
I held my breath and was sucked into the quicksand. Down, down into the earth. It spat me out into darkness and I landed on my feet. I dusted the sand off my shoulders and looked around. A clearing of sorts. With one item at its center. Lit from no discernible light source. Perhaps lit from within. No - it wasn’t one item. It was a pair. A pair of pointed shoes.
These are poulaines. Named by the French, referring to the Polish who invented them. They were popular in Medieval Europe as a status symbol. Impractical shoes meant that you were not the one doing physical labor.
A French count named Fulk le Rechin spearheaded the influence of these shoes as a fashion item in the 12th century. A monk (Orderic Vitalis, say that 5 times fast) recorded this in his ecclesiastical history:
“(le Rechin) encouraged a new fashion in the Western regions, delighting frivolous men in search of novelties. To meet it, cobblers fashioned shoes like scorpions’ tails…and almost all, rich and poor alike, now demand shoes of this kind. Before then shoes always used to be made round, fitting the foot, and these were adequate to the needs of high and low, both clergy and laity. But now laymen in their pride seize upon a fashion typical of their corrupt morals.”
Poulaine toes could range from 2 inches to over 12 inches. They were scandalous and frivolous at the time, as I’m sure they would be now. In 1215, Pope Innocent III referred to them as “Satan’s claws” (big words from a man who truly believes in Satan) and prohibited clergymen from wearing “shoes with embroidery or pointed toes.”
Perhaps he was right to use those words because the shoes turned out to be dangerous to their wearer. Historians inspected 177 skeletons from the height of the poulaine-craze and found “a plague of bunions” from ridiculously pointed feet. And beyond that, skeletons with pointy-shoe-wearing deformities were more likely to have fractured or broken bones in their wrists or arms, indicating a nasty fall due to their long-ass shoes.
Fact of the day: those types of injuries are called FOOSH. Fell On OutStretched Hand. The more you know.
Poulaines tapered off in popularity after 1465 when in England, Edward IV banned any shoe with a toe more than two inches long. Perhaps he was hoping to protect his countrymen from FOOSH. More likely, he was just being a controlling dick.
I’m working on a list of pointy offerings from today’s fashion market that I can’t wait to share with you. For now, consider sharing this newsletter with a friend, a lover, or a pointy-toed enemy.
xx Ruby
i did not know i needed to know this but man!! am i glad the tiktok algo shared your vid and brought me here!!! also, i am team ssense on the laptop! i love a good scroll sesh on my laptop