Male Wear
Although high-heeled shoes or boots have more often been worn by women, in various times and places they have been standard features of men's footwear too, either for practical reasons or as fashionable items.
Mongolian horsemen were among the first to use heels as means to keep their feet from sliding out of their stirrups. It is also well known that Egyptian butchers wore high heels so they would not step directly in offal. Pharaoh's and Nobles in Ancient Egypt would wear high heels to show power and for ceremonial purposes.
Actors playing tragic roles in ancient Greek drama wore the buskin, a boot with a platform sole, designed to give them greater height over other actors.
The Romans, both men and women, wore cothurns, or sandals with platform heels; these were intended to lift the wearers above mud and garbage in the streets. Geta, which are based on a similar concept, are still used in Japan today.
American cowboy boots, first developed in the 19th century and still popular today in some parts of the United States, have high underslung heels to keep a rider's foot from sliding through the stirrup.
High-heeled platform shoes were a widely popular form of men's footwear during the 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Heel (shoe)
Famous quotes containing the words male and/or wear:
“Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.”
—Kate Millet (b. 1934)
“No throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only businesswise-merely as retail differs from wholesale.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)