The Museum's flagship exhibition, All About Shoes, is a voyage through 4500 years of footwear: its evolution, uses over time, methods and materials of manufacture, and its place in our lives and imaginations. Admire ancient funerary sandals, Chinese silk shoes, haute couture pumps and a display of celebrity shoes found on the mezzanine.
Chopines were pedestal-like footwear that transformed upper-class women in Italy and Spain into towering figures during the Renaissance. The chopine’s primary purpose was to increase the wearer’s stature and proclaim her and her family’s status through extravagant dress.
Audio Transcript:
This velvet pedestal shoe worn sometime between 1580 and 1600 is an example of a rare type of Renaissance footwear called a chopine and is one of three examples in the Bata Shoe Museum's collection.
The chopine offered no mechanical advantage over other footwear worn at the time; instead, they were worn simply with the intention of drawing attention to the woman wearing them. Chopines elevated wearers - which were often the wives of wealthy men – effectively to display familial wealth through the conspicuous use of extra dress fabric needed to cover their pedestal shoes. These young women attended special events dressed in their finest dresses to display their charms and beauty as well as their family’s wealth and prestige; women only wore chopines after they were betrothed. The platform soles commonly reached heights of 10 to 25 cm but the most outrageous extant examples in the collection at Museo Bardini in Venice reached the astounding height of 54 cm. As you can imagine even the most conservative chopines were a challenge for navigation and so it was not uncommon to see women being assisted while wearing them.
Chopines developed first in Spain where they were made from cork and featured elaborately decorated leather surfaces, and then in Italy where they were made from wood covered with unembellished kidskin. The chopine had some popularity throughout Western Europe but nowhere reached the height of the Venetian examples. In England, in the late 1590s, the style was familiar enough that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in a moment of casual conversation, turns to a young actor who had previously played women’s roles, to say “B’yr lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine”. It’s a way of noting that the boy has had a growth spurt since Hamlet last saw him perform, and perhaps would no longer be able to play women’s roles. Later as the fashion reached its apex, upper-class courtesans adopted the style to approximate the dress of women of high social standing; in turn they could take advantage of the added height, which made them more visible and attractive to their clients.