Originally published on December 12, 2018 (Episode 89)
Introduction
“Fashion is universal,” writes my guest Kimberly Alexander, “enabling historians across time, place, and culture to form an understanding of the people who made clothes and who wore them. But shoes are different. As shoe scholar June Swann opines, ‘No other garment or accessory maintains the imprint of its wearer–even over long spans of time.’ A shoe molds to the foot and captures a facet of the physical characteristics of its wearer, as well as, by extension, an element of his or her personal history. We can study how much wear occurred and on what part of the shoe, how a shoe was altered or repaired, why a shoe or a pair of shoes were saved and handed down–and, from this, form a idea of the ordinary lives of the people who wore them.”
Shoes don’t just cover our feet—they carry our stories. In Treasures Afoot: Shoes Stories from the Georgian Era (Hopkins Press, 2018), Kimberly Alexander shows how eighteenth-century shoes preserve not only their wearers’ footprints but their histories: class, labor, disability, and even love. We discuss shoes as artifacts, fashion as a historical lens, why material culture belongs in the classroom, and how to talk about it.
About the Guest
Dr. Kimberly Alexander is Director of Museum Studies and Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches museum studies, material culture, American history, Architectural history, and New Hampshire history in the Department of History. She has held curatorial positions at several New England museums, including the MIT Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum and Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, NH.
For Further Investigation
Kimberly Alexander, Treasures Afoot: Shoes Stories from the Georgian Era (Hopkins Press, 2018)
Reading Disability in a Pair of Eighteenth Century Shoes: Mary Wise Farley, 1764
Kimberly Alexander shows a green silk wedding dress and matching shoes, also discussed in the podcast
Fashioning the New England Family (Massachusetts Historical Society exhibition)
Listen & Discuss
What can shoes reveal that other artifacts cannot?
How does fashion history challenge assumptions about the “ordinary”?
If you know someone obsessed with shoes, share this episode—they’ll never look at their closet the same way again. Maybe they will give them to a museum.
