The Americans called them “Mary Jane”. We call them “babies”. Lately, these flat shoes with one or more straps on the instep have worn a whole generation of young women. Who are probably unaware that this model was created in the 15th century, in France, for a man, King Charles VII who could, thanks to this “bear paw” shape, wear his feet with six toes with which he was afflicted following a congenital malformation…
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At the beginning of the 20th century, the round-toed shoe with strap was decorated with cute stitching in the shape of flowers, to accompany the hesitant gait of well-born little boys and girls in the United Kingdom, with the Windsor siblings in the lead. The leader of the genre is none other than the British Start-Rite, established since 1792 in the city of Norwich. But it is in the United States that the name “mary jane” appears, a nod to the very popular comic strip in the 1900s, Buster Brown…
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