Pumps

Charles Strohbeck, Inc.

ca. 1920 · leather · Costume Institute

With the emergence of short skirts in the later 1910s and 1920s, shoe design suddenly became much more important to fashion. Designers offered a variety of new ideas in a greatly expanding vocabulary of materials. This pair of shoes features the then-fashionable Colonial style in an extremely unusual and eye-catching blue-grey crackle patterned leather. Preserved as a sample by the Charles Strohbeck company, they are perhaps better interpreted as what was possible at the time, rather than what was actually manufactured. The distorted shape of the last exemplifies the extreme style seen around 1920: elongated and narrow lines, extremely pointed toe extending flat on the ground, and high narrow arch breaking in a sharp angle at the ball of the foot.

Artist

Charles Strohbeck, Inc.

Date

ca. 1920

Medium

leather

Culture

American

Department

Costume Institute

Credit line

Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Charles Strohbeck, 1964