Saddle Shoes: Gender Trends--Girls


Figure 2.--Here what looks like college girls wearing saddles shoes, anout 1940. The girls would have been called bobby sioxers because of the havy white socks. Saddle shoes were worn by both boys and girls, but were especially popular with girls, both pre-teens and teens.

Girls also began wearing saddle shoes, but we are not yet sure just when this began. The first girl we note wearing saddle shoes was an unidentied girl about 8-9 years old about 1915. Interestingly she is wearing them as a dress shoe even though they were being advertised as a sportsd shoe atb the time. As best we can tell from the photographic record, they were not very common in the 1910s and 20s. They had become very popular with girls by girls by the 1940s. Our archive is limited. We thinksaddle shoes became opilsr with girls in the 1930s, but we know they were being widely worn by the 40s. We are not yet sure about the convention. We nor girls wearing thm with bobbu socks, both with shorts and olled up jeans. We also note jounger girls wearing ith dresses. Older girls might wear them with skirts. They were a style that both boys and girls could wear. Again when fashions cross over from boys to girls wear, often boys will stop wearing the style. This did not happen at first with saddle shoes as they were commonly worn by boys in the 1950s and 1960s. They were featured by Wards and Sears as children's shoes until the late 1950s when the shoes became more were identified only as girls, except for toddler boys. Girls wore them to school, but there popularity was affected by the growing populrity of smeakers by the 1970s.









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Created: 5:40 AM 5/6/2013
Last updated: 11:56 AM 11/28/2013