Wooden shoes - past, present and ... future!?

My friend Daniela Ivanov, with whom I share a passion for wood, gave me the idea for this article. She told me about a German company that makes wooden shoes. As I was reading about them, other examples of shoes came to mind, some of which have even become a symbol of their country. I realized that wooden shoes have a rich past, they have a present, and they might have a future. Let's see what I am basing this on.

A brief history of wooden shoes

The best-known wooden shoes are of course the Dutch, but there is evidence of wooden shoes long before that. In the Clermont Museum in France, there is a pair of Gallo-Roman shoes, lined with sheepskin, dating back to the 2nd century.

Traditional geisha footwear, known as geta, is also made of wood. Also made of wood were the lotus-shaped shoes that shaped the lotus on the feet of Chinese women. These shoes could also be well studied as torture tools.

There's plenty of evidence of wooden shoe making around the world. I have chosen to show you a pair of shoes from China and slippers from India, Turkey and East Africa.

The forerunners of the Dutch shoe were wooden protectors for the footwear worn by aristocrats in the Middle Ages. They were called patterns and protected their shoes from the dirt and rubbish that was littering the streets at the time.

For the Dutch, wooden shoes are a long tradition and a country brand. Along with tulips and windmills, you'll find them in every souvenir shop. Now these klompen - as they're called - are made automatically, but in the past they were made by hand from a single piece of wood.

Wooden-soled slippers were also worn by country people when I was a child. I remember being in the summer, on vacation in the country, and my older cousins and I would make wooden slippers. We called them galenți. They were wooden soles cut to the shape of the foot, with a piece of leather studded to the front. They were a pair, for the right and left foot, not universal like the Japanese. They looked like the ones in the picture below. Because they were stiff, they were quite hard to walk in and you could hear you at a distance because they were horrible ☺. ☺

The present wooden shoes

Today, wood has become a popular material for fashion designers. They use it to make sophisticated soles for shoes, but also to create shoes that look more like abstract works of art.

The idea of naturalness in terms of the materials used for clothing and footwear has prompted manufacturers to rethink their stance on wood. Nike has created a pair of sneakers that uses wood veneer for the uppers.

A possible future

The German company we were talking about at the beginning, Nat-2, a sports footwear company, has taken the concept even further. They say the term vegan should not stop at food but should also be used for clothing and footwear.

Their shoes are made from 90% of wood from renewable forests and organic cotton. The wood they use is ash, birch, maple, cherry, elm and beech, depending on what is available in these forests FSC certificate. The glue used in the gluing has no animal components and the sole is made of natural rubber. The wood processing and shoe manufacturing is done in a specialized factory in Italy. The company assures us that the shoes are comfortable and durable.

Until you test the vegan wooden shoes, you can follow here a Dutch documentary movie from 1920 showing how clogs are made by hand. ☺ I hope you enjoy ☺