User:Juliahutcherson/Chopine

Chopines

A chopine is a type of women's platform shoe that was popular in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries after its original invention in Greek and/or Roman antiquity. Chopines were originally used as a patten, clog, or overshoe to protect the shoes and dress from mud and street soil. [sentences copied from Chopine] Most popular in Spain and Italy, chopines varied by country in style and material of construction and in style of wearing. Materials used for construction reflected the most common imports of the country at the time. Their cost and popularity among upper-class women created an association of chopines with class and wealth, though in Venice the style was also adopted by prostitutes. The word chopine originates from both Latin and Arabic and was adopted into both Spanish and Italian through multiple variations.

Overview

Surviving chopines are typically made of wood or cork, and those in the Spanish style were sometimes banded about with metal. Extant pieces are covered with leather, brocades, or jewel-embroidered velvet. Often, the fabric of the chopine matched the dress or the shoe, but not always. However, despite being highly decorated, chopines were often hidden under the wearer's skirt and were hidden from any critical observation. Although due to the design of the shoes, they caused the wearer to have a very "comical walk".

According to some scholars, chopines caused an unstable and inelegant gait. Noblewomen wearing them were generally accompanied by two servants in order to walk around safely, by supporting themselves on the servants' shoulders. Other scholars have argued that with practice a woman could walk and even dance gracefully. In his dancing manual Nobilità di dame (1600), the Italian dancing master Fabritio Caroso writes that with care a woman practiced in wearing her chopines could move “with grace, seemliness, and beauty” and even "dance flourishes and galliard variations". Chopines were usually put on with the help of two servants. [section content copies from Chopine]

Origins

Greek and Roman women in antiquity wore the first chopines: thick-soled sandals and boots. Greek styles were constructed from either leather-wrapped cork-bases or stacked-leather bottoms. Roman chopine-makers experimented with multiple constructions of wood, cork, and leather. When the Moors took over the Roman empire in the Middle Ages, they also adopted a strong oak industry, including cork production. Cork products like cork-soled shoes became important exports from the Moorish Empire; further developing the prevalence of cork-soled chopines in the Iberian Peninsula and the surrounding regions. Chopines were one of the few Roman styles that survived through the Moors' rule and were effectively adopted into Arabic fashion.

Similar raised platform shoes, such as geta, brought in from Japan and China may also be what Venetian chopines drew influence from. Chopines utilizing dual platforms bear similarities to Turkish nalins. This was a raised sole bath shoe intended to keep the wearer's feet dry.

Chopine in Italy

Chopines were popularly worn in Venice by both courtesans and patrician women from c. 1400 to 1700. Besides their practical uses, the height of the chopine became a symbolic reference to the cultural and social standing of the wearer; the higher the chopine, the higher the status of the wearer. High chopines allowed a woman to tower over others. During the Renaissance, chopines became an article of women's fashion and were made increasingly taller; some extant examples are over 20 inches (50 cm) high. In 1430, the height of chopines was limited by Venetian law to three inches, but this regulation was widely ignored. Shakespeare joked about the extreme height of the chopines in style in his day by using the word altitude (Hamlet 2.2, the prince greets one of the visiting players – the adolescent boy who would have played the female parts in the all-male troupe – by noting how much "nearer to heaven" the lad had grown since he last saw him "by the altitude of a chopine"). [paragraph copied from Chopine]

Italian chopines were typically constructed from a single block of wood platform, so the base was typically fluted with a flared base to reduce the weight of each shoe. Interestingly, no remaining wooden chopines show hollowed centers to further reduce weight, despite Sebastián de Covarrubias’s 1611 dictionary entry that makes this suggestion. The external carving works to reduce the weight, but the material and size make each shoe still significantly heavy. Turkish sources claim the origin of the ornate Venetian chopines were nalins developed for turkish baths.

The significant height of most Italian chopines' shafts were typically more plain than Spanish styles, but many were still decorated with elaborate, fragile materials like velvet, lace, ribbons, braids, and tassels. These adornments were typically attached at the top of the shaft or on the upper part of the shoe. Commonly, the sock lining was made from leather and had a pattern. Red and green were the most common chopine colors seen on courtesan women. The use of elaborate and expensive textiles to wrap chopines contributed to the appreciation and consumption of expensive textiles; an import than contributed significantly to Venice's wealth and class. In creating a chopine, fabric typically was used to wrap the wooden base block platform and to construct the toe-cover top portion of the shoe, either in one strap or two flaps to be laced together. The particular Venetian style of wearing chopines contributed to the textile industry in another, less direct way as well. Venetian etiquette for women required that their dresses grazed the floor; women went through a kind of training on how to move and even dance without exposing their shoes. This social rule required longer skirts as chopines grew taller, increasing the amount of fabric used for women's clothing and thus the cost of each piece. This increase in cost, for both the shoes and dress, perpetuated the idea that the higher the chopine, the higher the wealth and class of the wearer because the fabric was not only greater in quantity but also quality and cost.

In stark contrast to this association of chopine with wealth and class is the misconception originating from tourists in Venice that the shoes were a characteristic of "honest courtesans", state-sanctioned sex workers in the second half of the sixteenth century. Prostitutes in Venice dressed to mimic wealthy women, including chopines; but tourists who likely never saw upper class women wearing the style mistakenly fabricated an explicit connection between the style and sex workers. However, most honest courtesans who wore chopines left them exposed with shorter skirts, emulating the Spanish way of styling the shoes.

It was once believed that the more extreme chopines were worn by prostitutes, however the height increase had more to do with the wealth and status of the wearer rather than an indication of their profession.

Chopine in Spain

In the 15th century, chopines were also the style in Spain. Their popularity in Spain was so great that the larger part of the nation's cork supplies went towards production of the shoes. Some argue that the style originated in Spain, as there are many extant examples and a great amount of pictorial and written reference going back to the 14th century. Chopines of the Spanish style were more often conical and symmetric, while their Venetian counterparts are much more artistically carved. That is not to say, however, that Spanish chopines were not adorned; on the contrary, there is evidence of jeweling, gilt lettering along the surround (the material covering the cork or wooden base), tooling, and embroidery on Spanish chopines. [paragraph copied from Chopine]

The cork base made for a much lighter shoe despite the significant size. Spanish chopines were also quite ornate in decoration and relied heavily on a few of Spain's traditional leather tanning processes to construct the upper part of the shoe. Spanish styles often used the unique construction of an up-turned, closed toe, unlike others which were open-toe and often used two laced flaps for closure. The Spanish chopines flaunted elaborate embellishment in the high-quality leather as was the case with most Spanish leather works of the period. Valencia was well-known for producing the most expensive, luxurious chopines of gilded leather.

Spanish fashion dictated that a woman was to leave her chopines exposed below the hem of her dress, and some skirts were designed with a tuck or fold in the front to display the shoes. However, this was not the typical daily dress of Noble Christian Spanish women. Their regular dress, excluding celebratory occasion wear, was a long black cloak and veil that completely covered any garments beneath. Women were completely veiled from their head down to the top of their chopines. Because the ornate decoration of a woman's chopine was indicative of her wealth, her exposed shoes effectively teased the grandeur of her hidden garments.

Besides being indicative of class, chopines were evidence of a woman's marital status. A young woman received her first pair of chopines for her wedding; prior to marriage, women typically only wore slipper-style flats. The phrase "to put into chopines" meant to marry off one's daughter, giving her her first chopines. This significant association of chopines with weddings serves as an indicator that a wedding, particularly the bride's fashion, was an opportunity to flaunt her familial wealth and status. Weddings also served as a vehicle for social class ascension, so having more elaborate wedding chopines could indicate a rise to wealth and power.

Etymology

There are a great many cognates of the word chopine (chapiney, choppins, etc.). However, neither the word chopine nor any word similar to it (chioppino, cioppino, etc.) appears in Florio's dictionaries of either 1598 or 1611. The Italian word, instead, seems to be "zoccoli", which likely comes from the Italian word "zocco," meaning a stump or a block of wood. Florio does, however, use the word "chopinos" in his English definition of zoccoli. [paragraph copied from Chopine]

Arabic originally used the term "aqraq", originating from the Latin for cork, "quercus". Most Spanish chopines were constructed with cork bases imitating the ancient Roman style. Sebastián de Covarrubias’s 1611 dictionary, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, provides the later Arabic term for chopine, "chipin". Covarrubias also gives the Spanish term "chapín", which likely developed out of the word for a specific fir tree "sapino". Italian chopines' bases were typically constructed from fir wood, which explains the word origin but also the interdependence on cultures for both language and style.