What is it?? -Fashion Week Special

This week, for our little guessing game, we have chosen a chic little item just in time for London Fashion Week.

Click through to see if you can tell what this item might be:

It's a dainty Victorian silver shoe! Originally a base for a pin cushion.

We have had an obsession with shoes which dates back through history.
It is believed that shoes were being worn as far back 26,000 years ago. Anthropologists studying the bones of the feet revealed that anatomical changes to the foot bones coincided with the wearing of shoes.

From the Native American moccasin to the Egyptian sandal the shoe had practical uses and who knows if there may have been a certain amount of vanity attached.

The ancient Romans began to view footwear as a symbol of living in a civilised society and by the time we reached medieval times shoes were often viewed as a status symbol with the well heeled being, quite literall, well heeled, while the poor and lower classes remained barefoot.

European royalty began wearing high heels during the 15th century as a way of looking larger than life.
Until the 1800’s shoes were made to be interchangeable but gradually shoes were made to be worn on a definite foot.

The 1850’s saw the rise of the manufacture of shoes produced in modern factories with the help of shoe stitching machines which began to allow mass production.

Today the shoe industry is worth over £75 billion pounds annually, which is certainly a long way from the days of binding a bit of papyrus paper around the foot. There is no business like show business, I guess.
So, today we present to you this fine silver model of a Victorian shoe which, to me, stirs up memories of one of my favourite childhood stories by the Grimm Brothers, The Elves and the Shoemaker. What a lovely reminder of a young girls first foray into fashion.