Ever wonder how those stilettos ended up in your closet?

Flats, platforms, wedges and stilettos. Sandals, slippers, boots and clogs. Craftsmen and haute designers have been tweaking women`s footwear for centuries to reflect culture, politics and utility, but few have broken through with truly renegade reinventions.

"There are adaptations, but actual world-changing innovation is a lot less common than we might want to believe," said Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

The museum collects, exhibits and interprets footwear from around the world, with ۱۳,۰۰۰ examples of early designs and styles. Many are still referenced today, from thong sandals of the ancient East to towering chopines of Renaissance Europe.

Semmelhack gives credit to thinkers like Salvatore Ferragamo for his wartime cork wedges and Alexander McQueen for his ۱۰-inch lobster claws, but she points to the rise of celebrity designers themselves as perhaps the most influential development of all.

"Did you even think about who made your Keds? Over the course of the ۲۰th century, shoemakers have gone from anonymous craftsmen to fashion trendsetters," she said. "It`s a relatively new phenomenon."

So when, exactly, did shoes begin? No one knows precisely.

Foot-forward through time
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis theorize that western Eurasians used supportive footwear nearly ۳۰,۰۰۰ years ago, based on a shortening and weakening of the bones of the smallest four toes while leg muscles remained long and strong. Simpler, more ill-fitting coverings protected feet in harsh climates about ۵۰,۰۰۰ years ago, according to other research.

The oldest surviving specimens of shoes appear to be sagebrush bark strap sandals found in caves of the Northern Great Basin in Western North America that are thought to be more than ۹,۰۰۰ years old.

Sandals haven`t changed all that much since, or from ancient times in Egypt, Greece and China. Strappy gladiator touches have never gone out of style, bejeweled thongs mimic the practice of placing precious gems on shoes for royalty and platforms in the West can be traced in an almost unbroken timeline right on through to Carmen Miranda and Lady Gaga.

A surviving Spanish chopine mule with tooled leather over cork heels dates to before ۱۵۴۰ as one of the earliest platforms, Semmelhack said. One of the oldest depictions of people in high wooden clogs is "oriental" servants found in stone carvings on a ۱۲th-century church in France, according to the Bata museum s exhibition "On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels."

Even older, a wooden Japanese thong platform called a geta, with separate heel pieces, has been traced to ۳۰۰ B.C.

High, narrow stilettos didn t come into their own in the West until the ۱۹۵۰s, but chunkier heels detached from the front of a sole were everywhere among the upper crust in the ۱۷th and ۱۸th centuries. The separate high heel, Semmelhack said, "came into fashion in Europe but was worn in the Near East before it was of any interest to Europeans."

Height has a long history played out in the extreme in chopines nearly ۲۰ inches high in ۱۶th-century Venice.

"Venetian women were actually sequestered and only put on view at certain times of the year," Semmelhack said. "You don`t actually see the chopines themselves. They were put under women`s dresses. The cost of textiles was so high that wearing chopines meant more fabric and therefore higher status. They needed to lean on two servants and that was also a statement of how incredibly wealthy their families were."

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