Shock of the old: 10 pairs of filthy, fetishistic and fashionable shoes

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“In a world governed by ideal economic conditions … there will be no sensible shoes,” 1920s shoe designer André Perugia once said. We’re all wearing comfy, sexless trainers now, so draw your own conclusions. Thankfully, history has plenty of silly footwear at hand to amuse us, while we wonder where all our money went. Paleoanthropologists can tell when we started to wear shoes regularly by looking at feet: toe bones became spindlier about 40,000 years ago. Most of that footwear was too organic to survive. The oldest known example is a pair of sagebrush bark sandals that are probably about...