What kind of shoes did they wear in the 1920s? – Red Flapper Dress With Fringe Kids Boots

November 3, 2020 0 Comments

If your question about footwear is how to get into the shoes, a short answer is that people didn’t look for shoes because their feet were a good distance from each other! Most people wore them because their shoe size (or “girth”) fit just right, and they felt the comfort of the shoe in their calves. It is the way the shoe fit that affects the comfort of the foot, not the shoes.

The first real study was done by Dr. John Yager who in 1855, while he was working at the University of Cincinnati, took a group of students and asked each of them to wear a pair of sandals for two week. The students wore very small sandals compared to some other sizes, because they had to run to their classes in the cold (no sneakers or dress shoes were included with those sandals). The students wore sandals in the cold because there were none that could work better than the students could run. If they were running on the ice, there were no shoes at all. These sandals (a little narrower than what is used today) would have to have a heel of over five inches (about ten centimeters) in order to keep the feet nice and warm.

Yager was then asked if he could put a penny in a basket attached to the ends of the sandals. He had no trouble and this was a good result because that penny was no farther than one inch (almost half a centimeter).

The next study was done by Mr. William H. Hall, a shoe expert who went to the University of Massachusetts in 1877 and asked the very same question (although slightly in a different way, he did not measure the sandal in any case). When Hall collected the sandals of the group he had taken and put them into a basket with one penny into it.

Mr. Hall collected two baskets of sandals, one of the sandals of each student. He had one of these sandals in a large basket and the other in a smaller basket that was a little narrower than the first, and placed both in different places on the floor. The students were asked to sit comfortably while they ran about their class.


Once the weather had warmed up, the students tried to sit in the narrower basket and were surprised at how far apart their feet were. The narrow baskets did not work any better and the students decided to try to wear the slightly wider sandals next time.

The next and most famous study was done at

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