Buckled shoe styles

[OC Richard]

At first I was going to post this in the History & Heritage area, but since the main point is what is worn today I posted it here.

Why wear buckled shoes? Why has it always been idiomatic to wear buckled shoes and tartan/diced hose for Evening Dress?

It goes back to the 18th century when the same buckled shoes were worn by all men, in Saxon dress and Highland dress, civilian and military:



And tartan/diced hose because that's the only sort of kilt hose there were.

For some reason around the beginning of the 19th century collars got higher and the shoes got lower. More of the foot was exposed and the buckle moved down near the toes



This low-cut style persisted throughout the 19th century. They were the standard shoes of Highland officers throughout the Victorian period, when wearing long hose. I imagine that these were slip-on shoes, that the buckles were non-functional.



And in the civilian world too



At some point somebody must have said "hold on, my shoes are always slipping off!" and they added a strap with a small functional buckle to make the shoes more secure. This created our familiar so-called Mary Jane style, the standard Buckle Brogue today.



The big lower buckle, being merely ornamental, is seen left off sometimes in MacLeay



So that's the natural evolutionary path that lead to our Buckle Brogues of today.

But there's a second path, the Ghillie path.

In MacLeay, Ghillies are usually rather rustic-looking, made of rough tan leather





Yet there is one occurrence in MacLeay of Ghillies in shiny black with nonfunctional buckles added to the toes, and this appears over and over in old photos



Yes the rural outdoor Ghillie had moved indoors, and the Ghillie had come to be regarded as an Evening Dress shoe by the 1920s (though to me the buckle still looks like a tacked-on afterthought)