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The Evolution of Shoes’ Fashion

  • Posted on June 30, 2011 at 4:38 am

On the first day human beings wore shoes, they aimed to protect their foot from the elements beneath. As time goes on, shoes not only protect our foot but also show our fashion taste. There is a saying: you can tell a person by the shoes they wear. So it is very important to choose a pair of correct shoes for yourself.

Shoes where first named by the Greeks and later the Romans, who provided the root for many of our present day footwear styles, including soccus, sandalium and muleus (sock, sandal and mule). During the late Roman (Byzantine) empire, Christian morality deemed it sinful to expose the body. St Clement of Alexandria in the third century AD Preached humility for woman who showed their toes. Byzantine footwear covered the feet and shoes replaced the sandals that both men and women had worn for centuries.

Fashion began to change around 1600 as the barriers in dress distinction between classes started to break down. It became a commodity that was traded throughout Europe, remaining elitist through consumption, quality and extravagance. The working classes adapted high fashion into simpler modes using humbler materials and were only restricted by cost and practicality.

By the middle of the seventeenth century France had become a beacon of style for all of Europe to emulate. The excesses of baroque were indulged under Louis XIV, and the fashions and arts of France, favoured by European nobility, spread throughout fashionable society. Suddenly there was an interest in high thin-heeled shoes, and by the 1760s English ladies had abandoned their sensible heels to take up the French curvaceous pompadour heel and later, in the 1770s, the Italian stiletto like heel.

Just think of those different styles, shapes, constructions, decorations Fashion in expressed in different ways gender, age, economic strata and social echelon of its wearer. Fashion can facilitate or hinder comfort health and ease of movement. It reflects cultural ritual, morality and sexual liberation. It responds to foreign influences, political turmoil, economic stability and artistic sensibility. It is made by the latest scientific developments and technological innovations. It is influenced by popular culture and leading personalities. Everything that shapes our world affects and inspires fashion and by looking at historical fashion within the context of when it was made we can understand how it came about.

Wear Chic Gladiator Sandals In This Summer

  • Posted on June 28, 2011 at 1:22 am

In the hot summer, you certainly need to replenish your shoebox with a pair of chic gladiator sandals. No matter you wear flat gladiators or high-heeled gladiators, you can show your distinctive personal style. Furthermore, gladiator sandals have various colors and styles, so you can certainly find a best-setting one for yourself.

You can wear gladiator sandals for an everyday, casual outfit, but also for a day at work, or for a night out. There are several types of gladiator sandals from the ankle-high ones to the mid-calf and the knee-high ones. Even if at first sight it might seem a little difficult to wear gladiators, with just a few tips you’ll be able to wear one of the hottest summer shoe trends.

The best choice are gladiators in neutral colors such as black, beige, brown and white, as you can wear them with almost everything. Be careful if you want to buy gladiators in shiny or lighter colors, as these make your legs look thicker. You should always keep in mind that simple gladiators are easier to match. When choosing gladiators, be realistic and go for a pair that flatters you. Therefore, if your legs are slimmer, choose a pair of gladiators with thin straps. But, if your legs are rather thicker go for gladiators with wider straps.

Flat gladiators look great when matched with flirty, colorful summer dresses. Make sure to choose gladiators in neutral colors if your dress has floral or other prints. On the other hand, if your dress is plain, choose the gladiators in vivid colors. For a hippie look, pair flat gladiators with a long, white or printed dress, and a colorful headband into your hair.

Flat gladiators work with almost every type of pants. For a laidback, effortless look, team your flat gladiators with a pair of boyfriend jeans or a breezy, short skirt, a loose basic t-shirt. Paired with skinny jeans, a top and a dressy vest, gladiators are perfect for an urban chic look. For a sexy look, match your gladiators with shorts. If you are thinking of going to the beach, denim shorts, a top and sunglasses are the perfect combination. For a sailor look, wear gladiators with denim rolled up shorts, a sailor striped t-shirt, and a Panama hat. If you are looking for an evening outfit, choose a short ruffled dress, or a long empire one.

High-heeled gladiators add a bit of femininity to any look, and they work perfectly for petite women. They are perfect if you love a more glamorous style. Wear them with denim jumpsuits or with a short dress. For an urban look, pair your high-heeled gladiators with a denim skirt, a top and a vest. For a more dressy and elegant, yet simple look, wear pants, a t-shirt and a blazer on top with high-heeled gladiators that will add a touch of sophistication to your outfit. If you have a pair of gladiators that are higher on the leg, wear them with short jumpsuits for a safari style, a short dress, denim shorts and loose, white t-shirt. Chic gladiators will make you stunning and gorgeous in this summer.

Chocolate Shoes – Shoe Lover’s Best Gift

  • Posted on June 22, 2011 at 3:54 am

If you want to send a gift to a female friend, a pair of sweet chocolate shoes is absolutely a good option. Almost every woman in the world loves two things: Chocolate and Shoes. And chocolate shoes combine both two things, so which woman can refuse the sweet as well as stylish gift?

Wouldn’t it be a woman’s dream come true to combine these two things? Now we can. Did you know that someone somewhere is creating chocolate shoes right now? Yes, it is true!

When I was a little girl, my family used to spend the weekends on the beach at Hilton Head Island. Back then, there was a candy store on the Island called “The Chocolate Plantation.” My grandmother, who lived on the Island, worked at that candy store for a while. My sisters and I would save our money and look forward to buying the chocolate there, but I remember we had to eat it immediately when we left the store because it was so hot in the summertime in South Carolina that the chocolate melted as soon as we left the air conditioning and walked outside.

It is reported that one woman in the UK is making quite a nice living designing and creating chocolate shoes. Frances Cooley, creator of these shoes, explains, “People are wowed about them because it’s the perfect gift for a woman – chocolate and stiletto shoes put together.” I agree 100%! Get yourself or your friends, family chocolate shoes now!

Remove Your Shoes For A While

  • Posted on June 20, 2011 at 4:43 am

Do you have the habit of taking off your shoes at home? Many Asian countries such as Japan, China, Cambodia, Taiwan and India, Sweden, Canada, Jamaica, Turkey, parts of Europe and the UK, and Hawaii have this tradition.

While some cultures, like the Japanese, take off shoes primarily to keep their floors and tatami mats clean (because they sit and sleep on them), others have a more religious origin related to removing shoes before entering a sacred space or place of worship.

Japanese, take off shoes primarily to keep their floors and tatami mats clean (because they sit and sleep on them), others have a more religious origin related to removing shoes before entering a sacred space or place of worship.

The fact is, there are millions of people around the world doing it, yet somehow, here in America, we often balk at the idea.  Perhaps it’s because of the inconvenience or maybe because we feel “exposed” without our footwear.

Why do it?  Well, to be frank, shoes are dirty. We walk around all day – on surfaces ranging from sidewalks and pesticide treated grass to offices, restaurants and retail stores.  And, let’s not forget public restrooms!  We pick up dirt, bacteria, and chemicals and it stays on the bottom of our shoes – then we carry that into our home.  We relax, put our feet up, step on a chair to get down a vase, and eventually take off our shoes and crawl into bed.

Granted I am a bit of a clean freak…it comes with the territory when you are Feng Shui consultant and interior designer, but the statistics do not lie.  As cited in a first-quarter issue of Parenting Magazine this year, 85% of the germs in our homes are carried in on our shoes.

An ABC Good Morning America report, based on studies done at the University of Arizona, found infection-causing bacteria on people’s shoes – 90% of which transferred to the floors in a house.  For carpets, the percentage was even higher.  The researchers noted that toilet seats were actually significantly cleaner.

And, while some of us just walk on our floors, many have pets and children that spend hours crawling or playing on that surface -  toddlers putting their hands in their mouths up to 100 times in a single hour.  That alone should be reason enough!

If you need additional encouragement, consider a few more philosophical reasons:

1) Our home is a sanctuary (or it could be). We revere people, food, clothing, and cars. However, often forget about our environment.
2) Bare feet can help us feel more relaxed and grounded. Just like changing from our work clothes and slipping into “something more comfortable,” we can achieve a similar feeling when we leave our footwear at the door.
3) It’s a great “transitional” tool. When going from outdoors to in, this practice can support us in shifting our energy to being “at home.”

If you dislike bare feet, have socks, slippers or other “indoor” footwear near the door. That will keep your floors, carpets and rugs and overall home cleaner, and your immune systems stronger.  It will also help reduce noise, and establish a sense of reverence for our homes. If we shower, wash dishes and brush our teeth every day…perhaps we can also remove our shoes to honor and respect our home in the same way we honor ourselves. You can take a try!!

You Walk Wrong

  • Posted on June 17, 2011 at 2:28 am

Walking seems very simple for everyone. Like eating, talking and breathing, walking is a very common daily activity. However, scientists claim that most of us walk wrong. Why? Maybe you can find your desired answer in the below content.

Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”

Okay, so shoes can be less than comfortable. If you’ve ever suffered through a wedding in four-inch heels or patent-leather dress shoes, you’ve probably figured this out. But does that really mean we don’t walk correctly? (Yes.) I mean, don’t we instinctively know how to walk? (Yes, sort of.) Isn’t walking totally natural? Yes—but shoes aren’t.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

Perhaps this sounds to you like scientific gobbledygook or the ravings of some radical back-to-nature nuts. In that case, you should listen to Galahad Clark. Clark is 32 years old, lives in London, and is about as unlikely an advocate for getting rid of your shoes as you could find. For one, he’s a scion of the Clark family, as in the English shoe company C&J Clark, a.k.a. Clarks, founded in 1825. Two, he currently runs his own shoe company. So it’s a bit surprising when he says, “Shoes are the problem. No matter what type of shoe. Shoes are bad for you.”

This is especially grim news for New Yorkers, who (a) tend to walk a lot, and (b) tend to wear shoes while doing so.

I know what you’re thinking: If shoes are so bad for me, what’s my alternative?

Simple. Walk barefoot.

Okay, now I know what you’re thinking: What’s my other alternative?

Galahad Clark never intended to get into the shoe business, let alone the anti-shoe business. And he likely never would have, if it weren’t for the Wu-Tang Clan. Clark went to the University of North Carolina, where he studied Chinese and anthropology. He started listening to the Wu-Tang, the Staten Island rap collective with a fetish for martial-arts films and, oddly, Wallabee shoes. As it happens, Clark’s father had invented the Wallabee shoe. “I figured this was my chance to go hang out with them,” Clark says. “One thing led to another, and we developed a line of shoes together. That’s what sucked me back into the industry.”

After college, Clark returned to England, where he started working with Terra Plana, a company devoted to ecologically responsible shoes, and started United Nude, a high-design shoe brand, with the architect Rem D. Koolhaas. Then, in 2000, Clark was approached by Tim Brennan, a young industrial-design student at the Royal College of Art. Brennan was an avid tennis player who suffered from chronic knee and ankle injuries. His father taught the Alexander Technique, a discipline that studies the links between kinetics and behavior; basically, the connection between how we move and how we act. Brennan’s father encouraged Tim to try playing tennis barefoot. Tim was skeptical at first, but tried it, and found that his injuries disappeared. So he set out to design a shoe that was barely a shoe at all: no padding, no arch support, no heel. His prototype consisted of a thin fabric upper with a microthin latex-rubber sole. It wasn’t exactly a new idea. It was a modern update of the 600-year-old moccasin.

Coupons – Weapons Against High Costs

  • Posted on June 14, 2011 at 10:01 pm

If you want to go shopping online, coupons are always smart choices. No matter you want to buy clothes or shoes, you can always find various coupon codes on the web. Many online retailers will give coupon codes to promote their products, and then you can save much money using these coupons. Where to find these useful coupons? You can go to some big coupon websites to find your desired coupons or get coupon codes in the ‘Deal’ part of forums.

Coupons and sale papers are both used like weapons against high costs, giving the discount shopper a feeling of achievement. The desire to shop isn’t poor inside itself. However, everything should be curtailed at some point as not to impact other areas of life. Though discount shopping specialists tend to save cash on a product by item basis, they frequently wind up spending much more cash than other people as they buy more and more items. The shear volume of goods purchased totally bursts the save money bubble. Budgets are blown and also the guilt of having spent an excessive amount of cash sets in.

Who does not wish to save cash and get great discounts on their purchase? Since all of us work truly tough to earn so we all want to save as much money as we could. These days, the life style of individuals has changed and they are absorbed in their work and rarely find time to go out and shop. They discover web as the easiest medium to connect to their friends and do online shopping. Shopping on the internet is quiet enjoyable as you get to see all of the newest selection. Also greatest component about on-line shopping is that you are able to refine your search by filling the specification online like color, size and even cost range and you are able to see all of the goods obtainable based on your needs. Discount shopping websites are many online as web marketers are attempting hard to maintain up their company so they’re offering so many discounts to their clients. To attract much more visitors towards their web site and have more number of conversion sales you can see improve in the number of discount shopping sites. You can extremely effortlessly search for discount shopping websites on-line. All you should do is write key phrases like discounted products or discount sale within the search engine and you will get a list of all the discount shopping sites. Inserting the right keyword will help you in discovering the suitable web site you are looking for unless you’re conscious of the URL of the on-line shopping website you trust. By no means purchase a product
by just reading details about it and searching at its picture. The photos displayed on the web sites may different from the original products so you must pay more attention towards its functions. Read all its functions and select the product that satisfies all your shopping requirements. Also make certain that you compare the cost of the product with atleast three to four other discount shopping websites before purchasing it. And if you’re short of time then all you need to do is browse and shop from the websites that permits you to view products from several brands. The website that helps you in checking the latest variety among several brands under 1 platform is rather time saving and beneficial.

What exactly you need to do is copy the code you’re interested in so you are able to use it successfully on the merchant’s internet website from which you intend to buy. And on the internet to accomplish is after which you can go towards the checkout site and key in the voucher code into your correct location. Usually it offer you with an choice to revise your card consequently , the new cost shall be reflected to exhibit the lower cost the voucher value provided everybody.