Footwear refers to garments worn on the feet, which typically serve the purpose of protection against adversities of the environment such as wear from rough ground; stability on slippery ground; and temperature.
Shoes and similar garments ease locomotion and prevent injuries. Such footwear can also be used for fashion and adornment, as well as to indicate the status or rank of the person within a social structure.
Socks and other hosiery are typically worn additionally between the feet and other footwear for further comfort and relief.
Cultures have different customs regarding footwear. These include not using any in some situations, usually bearing a symbolic meaning. This can however also be imposed on specific individuals to place them at a practical disadvantage against shod people, if they are excluded from having footwear available or are prohibited from using any. This usually takes place in situations of captivity, such as imprisonment or slavery, where the groups are among other things distinctly divided by whether or not footwear is being worn.
In some cultures, people remove their shoes before entering a home. Bare feet are also seen as a sign of humility and respect, and adherents of many religions worship or mourn while barefoot. Some religious communities explicitly require people to remove shoes before they enter holy buildings, such as temples.
In several cultures people remove their shoes as a sign of respect towards someone of higher standing. Similarly, deliberately forcing other people to go barefoot while being shod oneself has been used to clearly showcase and convey one's superiority within a setting of power disparity.
Practitioners of the craft of shoemaking are called shoemakers, cobblers, or cordwainers.
In medieval Europe, leather shoes and boots became more common. At first most were simply pieces of leather sewn together and then held tight around the foot with a toggle or drawstring. This developed into the turnshoe, where the sole and upper were sewn together and then turned inside-out to hide and protect the seam and improve water resistance. From the reign of Charlemagne, Byzantine fashions began to influence the west and the pontificalia of the popes and other bishops began to feature greater luxury, including embroidered silk and velvet slippers. By the High Middle Ages, fashion trends periodically prompted sumptuary taxes or regulations and church condemnation for vanity. The 12th-century pigache and 14th- and 15th-century poulaine had elongated toes, often stuffed to maintain their shape. Around the same time, several mendicant orders began practicing discalceation as an aspect of their vows of humility and poverty, going entirely barefoot at all times or only wearing sandals in any weather. From the 1480s, the poulaine was replaced by the duckbill, which had a flat front but soon became impractically wide. The stiff hose of the era usually required fairly soft footwear, which in turn was easier to damage in the dirt and muck of the street and outdoors. This led many people to use wooden-soled calopedes, pattens, or galoshes, overshoes that served as a platform while walking.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Particularly in Venice, these platforms were combined with the shoe to make chopines, sometimes so awkwardly high that the wearer required servants to help support them. (Turkish sources, meanwhile, credit the chopines directly to the nalins worn in Ottoman baths and whose height was considered to be a marker of status.)<ref>Template:Citation.</ref>
Amid the Industrial Revolution, John Adam Dagyr's introduction of assembly line production<ref name=krt/><ref name=mulligan>Template:Citation.</ref> and tight quality control<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> to the "ten-footer" workshops<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> in Lynn, Massachusetts, US, around 1760 is sometimes credited as the first shoe factory.<ref name=eb/> However, although mechanized textile mills greatly reduced the price of proper socks, each step of the shoemaking process still needed to be done by hand in a slowly optimized putting-out system.<ref name=mulligan/><ref>Template:Citation</ref> The first mechanized systemsTemplate:Mdashdeveloped by Marc Isambard Brunel in 1810 to supply boots to the British Army amid the Napoleonic WarsTemplate:Mdashfailed commercially as soon as the wars were over because the demobilized soldiers reduced the price of manual labor.<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> John Nichols's 1850 adaptation of Howe and Singer's sewing machines to handle binding uppers to soles<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> and the Surinamese immigrant Jan Ernst Matzeliger's 1880 invention of an automatic lasting machine finally allowed true industrialization, taking the productivity of individual workers from 20 or 50 pairs a day to as many as 700, halving prices,<ref name=mulligan/><ref>Template:Citation.</ref> and briefly making Lynn the center of world shoe production.Template:Sfnp<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> As late as 1865, most men in the industry identified in the census and city directory as general purpose "cordwainers" or "shoemakers"; by 1890, they were almost universally described as "shoe workers" orTemplate:Mdashmore oftenTemplate:Mdashby the specific name of their work within the industry: "edgesetter", "heel trimmer", "McKay machine operator".<ref name=mulligan/> Many were replaced by cheaper immigrants;<ref name=mulligan/> the Czech Tomáš Baťa joined these workers at Lynn in 1904 and then returned to his own factory in Zlín, Moravia, mechanizing and rationalizing its production while guiding the factory town that developed into a garden city.
The international trade in footwear was at first chiefly restricted to American exports to Europe and Europe's exports to its various colonial empires.Template:Sfnp Assisted by the Marshall Plan after World War II, Italy became the major shoe exporting country in the 1950s.Template:Sfnp<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> It was joined in the 1960s by Japan, which offshored its production to Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong as its own labor became too expensive.Template:Sfnp In their turn, the Hong Kong manufacturers began moving production to Guangdong in mainland China almost immediately after the establishment of Deng Xiaoping's Opening Up Policy in the early 1980s.Template:Sfnp Competitors were soon forced to follow suit, including removal of Taiwanese and KoreanTemplate:Sfnp production to Fujian and to Wenzhou in southern Zhejiang.Template:Sfnp Similarly, amid Perestroika and the Fall of Communism, Italy dismantled its domestic industry, outsourcing its work to Eastern Europe, which proved less dependable than the Chinese and further eroded their market share.Template:Sfnp Beginning around the year 2000, China has constantly produced more than half of the world's shoes.<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> As of 2021, footwear is the 30th most traded category internationally;<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> but, while China produces well over 60% of exported footwear,<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> it currently earns less than 36% of the value of the total tradeTemplate:Sfnp owing to the continuing importance of American, German, and other brands in the North American and European markets.
Modern footwear is usually made of leather or plastic, and rubber. In fact, leather was one of the original materials used for the first versions of a shoe.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The soles can be made of rubber or plastic, sometimes with the addition of a sheet of metal on the inside. Roman sandals had sheets of metal on their soles so that they would not bend out of shape.
In more recent times, footwear suppliers such as Nike have begun to source environmentally friendly materials.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
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In Europe, recent decades have seen a decline in the footwear industry. While about 27,000 firms were in business in 2005, only 21,700 remained in 2009. Not only have these firms decreased in number, but direct employment has also reduced within the sector.<ref>Template:Cite report</ref>
In the U.S., the annual footwear industry revenue was $48 billion in 2012. In 2015, there were about 29,000 shoe stores in the U.S. and the shoe industry employed about 189,000 people.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Due to rising imports, these numbers are also declining. The only way of staying afloat in the shoe market is to establish a presence in niche markets.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
To ensure high quality and safety of footwear, manufacturers have to make sure all products comply to existing and relevant standards. By producing footwear in accordance with national and international regulations, potential risks can be minimized and the interest of both textile manufacturers and consumers can be protected.
The following standards/regulations apply to footwear products:
Footwear can create two types of impressions: two-dimensional and three-dimensional impressions.<ref name=":02">Template:Cite book</ref> When footwear places material onto a solid surface, it creates a two-dimensional impression.<ref name=":02" /><ref name=":12">Template:Cite book</ref> These types of impressions can be made with a variety of substances, like dirt and sand.<ref name=":02" /> When footwear removes material from a soft surface, it creates a three-dimensional impression.<ref name=":02" /><ref name=":12" /> These types of impressions can be made in a variety of soft substances, like snow and dirt.<ref name=":02" /> Two-dimensional impressions also differ from three-dimensional impressions because the latter demonstrate length, width, and depth whereas two-dimensional impressions only demonstrate the first two aspects.<ref name=":12" />
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