Pointy shoes.
Jan. 17th, 2025 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo I saw a thing on Metafilter today about pointy shoes. And now I have some thoughts and discoveries about pointy shoes that I am going to share with you.
If you are on the internet enough like I am, you may have seen this skit about a guy and some other guys who are all the same guy but are supposed to be different guys (because they have different clothes, which is how you represent characters in these one-person skits, it's not like Rakugo where all the storytelling is done through gesture and voice. You get outfits, too) and their... boot envy. It's very well done, for what it is, but on seeing it some months ago, I was like... cute skit, but nobody would wear boots pointy like that. These are, thought I, unrealistic depictions of boots that a person might wear unironically outside of a tiktok. I thought that. You might very well also be thinking that.
And you would be wrong. These pointy colorful boots were a thing for a while in a particular music scene for people in Mexico and Texas. Los botas picudas were real and people really wore them. Lots of people? Dunno. Enough to make a video about it? Yeah. Maybe it's silly but it sure as shit wasn't a one-off thing.
Turns out that pointy boots, or at least super fucking pointy footwear, was a thing before, in history back. There's a bbc article about the pointy shoes from back then.
Were they really pointy? They were. Seriously? Yes. And apparently they were pointy enough to increase the presence of bunions from like 6% of the adult skeletons to about 27% of the adult skeletons. They were reasonably popular from about the 1300's to the 1400's, off and on, but definitely a thing.
And now I'm wondering if we as a group of people just have an empty space in our souls that occasionally cries out for stupidly pointy shoes. We've done it at least twice.
As well, but not about pointy shoes, we should probably believe the details represented in old drawings and paintings that are not the point of the drawing or painting. Like if the picture is generally "about" something other than peoples' shoes, probably the artist is doing a legit job of depicting the shoes. Or if the picture is not "about" how slanty the writing surfaces for a monk are, probably the writing surface really is that slanty.
I first noticed this a while back while playing with goose feather cut quills for calligraphy (a thing I never got gud at, shocker) and in the depictions of, like, monks in a scriptorium, you have the monks working on these easel-like things that are pretty effing steep. They are not flat like a desk, but pretty steep like an easel. This is so that when you are writing with the quill, it's almost level and the ink flow is a lot more manageable. Like, once you try it, you have no trouble believing the slanty nature of the easels or whatever.
And when you see pictures of people wearing long pointy shoes in the middle ages, it's not because the artists fucking sucked at drawing feet and didn't know how to stop with the toes. Nope. It's because people were wearing stupidly long pointy shoes.
And when you see rather... moose knuckle oil portraits of dudes in buckskin pants, well, that's because they wore 'em pretty darned snug. I read a delightfully snarky article about this with picture illustrations of real art that were somewhere adjacent to Tom of Finland work and it was wonderful but also it was like eight or ten years ago and now I cannot find it and I am sorry. I didn't think I'd need it again and thus did not keep it.
If you are on the internet enough like I am, you may have seen this skit about a guy and some other guys who are all the same guy but are supposed to be different guys (because they have different clothes, which is how you represent characters in these one-person skits, it's not like Rakugo where all the storytelling is done through gesture and voice. You get outfits, too) and their... boot envy. It's very well done, for what it is, but on seeing it some months ago, I was like... cute skit, but nobody would wear boots pointy like that. These are, thought I, unrealistic depictions of boots that a person might wear unironically outside of a tiktok. I thought that. You might very well also be thinking that.
And you would be wrong. These pointy colorful boots were a thing for a while in a particular music scene for people in Mexico and Texas. Los botas picudas were real and people really wore them. Lots of people? Dunno. Enough to make a video about it? Yeah. Maybe it's silly but it sure as shit wasn't a one-off thing.
Turns out that pointy boots, or at least super fucking pointy footwear, was a thing before, in history back. There's a bbc article about the pointy shoes from back then.
Were they really pointy? They were. Seriously? Yes. And apparently they were pointy enough to increase the presence of bunions from like 6% of the adult skeletons to about 27% of the adult skeletons. They were reasonably popular from about the 1300's to the 1400's, off and on, but definitely a thing.
And now I'm wondering if we as a group of people just have an empty space in our souls that occasionally cries out for stupidly pointy shoes. We've done it at least twice.
As well, but not about pointy shoes, we should probably believe the details represented in old drawings and paintings that are not the point of the drawing or painting. Like if the picture is generally "about" something other than peoples' shoes, probably the artist is doing a legit job of depicting the shoes. Or if the picture is not "about" how slanty the writing surfaces for a monk are, probably the writing surface really is that slanty.
I first noticed this a while back while playing with goose feather cut quills for calligraphy (a thing I never got gud at, shocker) and in the depictions of, like, monks in a scriptorium, you have the monks working on these easel-like things that are pretty effing steep. They are not flat like a desk, but pretty steep like an easel. This is so that when you are writing with the quill, it's almost level and the ink flow is a lot more manageable. Like, once you try it, you have no trouble believing the slanty nature of the easels or whatever.
And when you see pictures of people wearing long pointy shoes in the middle ages, it's not because the artists fucking sucked at drawing feet and didn't know how to stop with the toes. Nope. It's because people were wearing stupidly long pointy shoes.
And when you see rather... moose knuckle oil portraits of dudes in buckskin pants, well, that's because they wore 'em pretty darned snug. I read a delightfully snarky article about this with picture illustrations of real art that were somewhere adjacent to Tom of Finland work and it was wonderful but also it was like eight or ten years ago and now I cannot find it and I am sorry. I didn't think I'd need it again and thus did not keep it.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-18 10:38 am (UTC)