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 my mind, some of which have even become country symbols. I realised that wooden shoes have a rich past, they have a present and they might have a future. Let's see what I'm basing this on.

A short 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 from the 2nd century.

The traditional geisha footwear, known as geta, is also made of wood. Wooden shoes were also used to give the lotus shape to Chinese women's feet. These shoes could also be well studied as torture tools.

There is 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 Dutch shoes 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 thrown on the streets at that time.

Wooden shoes are a long tradition and a country brand for the Dutch. Along with tulips and windmills you can find them in all souvenir shops. Now these klompen - as they are called - are made automatically, but in the past they were made by hand from a single piece of wood.

Wooden-soled slippers were worn by country people when I was a child. I remember being in the summer, on holiday, in the countryside and my older cousins and I used to make wooden slippers. We used to tell them galenti. They were wooden soles cut to the shape of the foot's paw, which had a piece of leather in the front fastened with studs. They were pairs, for the right and left foot, not universal like the Japanese ones. They looked like the ones in the picture below. Being stiff they were quite hard to walk in and you could hear yourself from far away because they whined terribly ☺.

The present wooden shoes

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

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

A possible future

The German company I mentioned 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.

Thus, the shoes they produce are made of 90% renewable wood and organic cotton. The wood used is ash, birch, maple, cherry, elm and beech, depending on what is available in these forests. FSC certificate. The glue used for gluing has no components of animal origin and the sole is made of natural rubber. The wood processing and shoe manufacturing is done in a specialised 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 film from 1920 showing how clogs are made by hand. I hope you enjoy it ☺.