If you are lucky enough to have come across a spectacular pair of vintage high heels or other shoes, you may be interested to work out the era or year that they date from.
But it is sometimes very difficult to work out the date of clothing or footwear items simply by their appearance, even though we obviously know that fashion goes in cycles.
However often we have little else to go by: while you should find the maker, size and possibly the words vero cuoio written or impressed somewhere on your vintage heels, shoemakers are unfortunately yet to add a date stamp.
When looking for assistance on this question, I found that highly renowned fashion curator, author and historian Jonathan Walford once gave an interview to Sara Brandon of Sararavintage.com in which he was asked whether he could quickly give some tips about analysing or dating a shoe.
Jonathan Walford is currently the Curatorial Director at the Fashion History Museum in Ontario, Canada. He was the inaugural curator at the Bata Shoe Museum, where he worked for 11 years. He also published his own wonderful fashion history blog until June 2021 (the blog is still available online).
In other words, he knows what he is talking about and then some when it comes to dating heels.
Jonathan made the point that it is difficult to be specific about what to look for when dating a pair of shoes because everything about the shoes has to be considered. As is evident from that response, some considerable expertise and knowledge may be required to accurately establish the date of a footwear item with some confidence. Even then it might not be possible.
Unfortunately Sarara Vintage has unfortunately disappeared from the web, so I can only link to an archive form of the interview (which took place in June 2013) here.
In that interview Jonathan did give a list of some of the matters to consider when dating shoes. I will set them out here in a little more detail than is customary since the original interview has been unpublished. Those factors are:
Style: shape of heel, shape of toe…
Type of shoe: slingback, open toe, sandal…
Materials: leather, neolite, wood…
Colour: wartime colour restrictions of leather footwear, aniline dyes…
Decoration: embroidery, tooled design, buckle, trim… even the colour of the lining.
Maker: label of store (location might have changed over time), designer, manufacturer, typeface used in lettering, type of label (stamped gold, fabric…)
Origin: can be determined by sizing (German and British, American and Canadian, and French and Italian each share a similar sizing…)
Jonathan also reiterated that, even with all these clues the skill of dating shoes can still come down to whether there are enough clues in the individual shoe itself.
“Sometimes there is an overwhelming element that defines a pair of shoes, or any garment, but as fashion from the last twenty years has been a series of revivals, and newer items can appear very much like older examples, it becomes more difficult to be sure,” he said.