In 1868 sneakers were called Felonies.

Editor&#;s Note:  Old School sent me a collection of essays from old Land&#;s End catalogs&#; and they are fantastic.  We&#;ll feature some of them &#; there&#;s an essay on ironing your own shirt (the male author says, &#;You may call me a pantywaist but&#;&#;) (I have to tell you, I had no idea pantywaist was one word), and a foreshadowing piece from entitled Why A Tie?  which falls under the asked and answered category.  Today we think about the sneaker.  I wear sneakers (no socks) from Easter til Halloween alongside the boat shoes and loafers.  In the summer, there are several acceptable brands.  New Balance.  Sketchers (yes, and please, I know you haven&#;t tried them if you knock them), Converse canvas, etc.  Starting about now, there is only one brand that works, and they should probably be suede &#; Tretorn.  At any rate, the history of the sneaker from a company which when I looked today sold sneakers on their website and calls them anything but. &#; JB

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From Creepers to High-tops: A Brief History of the Sneaker

Sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII of England, noticing that his waistline had gravitated down to about his knees, decided some exercise might be a good idea. Summoning his valet he placed an order for, &#;Syxe Paire of shooys with feltys, to pleye in at tennys.&#; His valet bowed and left, shaking his head, wondering where in the world he was going to find someone to fill that little royal order?

King Henry wasn&#;t talking about sneakers as we know them, that&#;s true. But he had the right idea. Shooys with feltys, to pleye in at tennys, was simply the best his world offered in the way of lightweight athletic footwear. Down the narrow, dirty streets of London trudged that unknown valet, searching for a shooymaker to do the job, never surmising that the first faint notes of a billion dollar industry had been sounded.

A happy accident.

The modern sneaker had its start the way all the best legendary things do, by accident. A small Connecticut manufacturer, Charles Goodyear, was trying to come up with a waterproof mail bag for the U.S. Government, which had grown weary of its mail getting wet when it rained. A rubber-covered canvas fabric would do the job if Charles could just get the rubber to cooperate. It refused to adhere to the canvas and insisted on turning gummy in summer and brittle in winter.

Goodyear persevered. One day while holding aloft a ladle of his latest failure, he gave the mixture an angry shake. A glob flew from the ladle and landed on a hot stove. He peeled the rubber concoction off the stove and was amazed at what he had. The heat had changed it. Kneading the small piece in his fingers he found that it was now strong and elastic. Further tests proved it to be stable at both high and low temperatures. The rubber had gotten itself vulcanized. Spurred on by this turn of events, he perfected the procedure, made the waterproof mailbags, and opened the way for two things that changed civilization &#; automobile tires and sneakers.

Felonies, Creepers and Plimsolls.

In , using Goodyear&#;s vulcanizing process, a shoe with a reliable rubber sole, canvas uppers and laces was produced. At six dollars a pair the shoes were out of the reach of average folk, but quickly became the darlings of the idle rich. They called them croquet sandals.

Then they called them felonies (because of what people who wore them were quietly able to do), then brothel creepers for the same reason, then gumshoes and in England, Plimsolls. (Plimsolls refers to Samuel Plimsoll, an Englishman, who proposed the Shipping Act of , that required ships to be marked with safe waterlines &#; lines which resembled those around the new canvas shoes.)

Meanwhile back in the states&#;

U.S. Rubber bought Charles Goodyear&#;s business. U.S. Rubber felt that those funny canvas shoes being produced might be winners, but something had to be done about a name. The term sneakers had made its appearance by then but it was too generic. They wanted something more distinctive, more their own.

They wanted to call the shoe they were about to produce a Ped, but another company was already using that term. After three years of vigorous thought, they narrowed the choice of a name down to two &#; Ved or Ked. It boggles the mind, doesn&#;t it? They ultimately decided on Ked because (again as the legend goes) they felt K was the strongest letter in the alphabet. So Keds were born. The rest, as the books love to say, is history.

By catalogs were offering the shoe for a mere sixty cents, and in no time at all it was the preferred gym shoe, selling 25 million pairs in one year. In , Marquis M. Converse who was working hard in Malden, Massachusetts producing rubber overshoes, came to the hard realization that overshoes would never set the world on fire and turned his attention to sneakers. In he introduced the Converse All-Star &#; the first shoe designed primarily for basketball. It was and still is a success.

Then came two world wars, and the industry&#;s attention was elsewhere, but in the late &#;s, things picked up again. Several new companies began producing highly individualized sneakers, and resorted to aggressive marketing to push their products. By the &#;s some manufacturers were paying professional athletes to wear their designs.

Our &#;best friends.&#;

By the seventies the canvas shoe market had exploded and hundreds of companies world-wide were producing them. Before you knew it, if you wore shoes at all you probably wore sneakers at least part of the day.

No article of personal wear, with the possible exception of jeans, has ever engendered the kind of love and devotion sneakers have. People feel about them the way they feel about a close friend. They wear them until they are threadbare. They wear them until their soles have departed their bodies and then they tie strings around them and wear them some more.

They&#;ve come a long way from King Henry&#;s day, those little rubber-soled, canvas devils. They&#;ve sneakered their way into every phase of our lives. Babies wear them, octogenarians wear them, as does every age in between. They&#;ve been immortalized in pen, and paint, clay and cloth. What would we do without them?

So thank you Charles Goodyear for persevering. I like the dry mail and safe tires, but I&#;m crazy mad about those sneakers.

Earlier this year, hundreds of Australians queued for hours ... for the right to splurge a few hundred bucks on a pair of shoes, designed by the rapper Kanye West

It was yet another example of the timeless appeal of the sneaker - arguably one of the great symbols of western capitalism - and of conspicuous consumerism.

Photo: AFP

But in an age where companies' reputations can hang on their environmental record, where does this leave the humble sneaker heading into the future?

Emily Brayshaw is a lecturer in fashion and design at the University of Technology Sydney and she's written an article on the topic for The Conversation website. She joined Jesse Mulligan to explain more.

Designer fashion, nostalgia magnet - what's behind the rise and rise of the sneaker?

In June this year, hundreds of Australian shoppers queued &#; some overnight &#; to buy a pair of Yeezy Boost 350 V2 Black Static Adidas sneakers the moment they went on sale. Before lining up, customers had to register and go into a draw to determine whether they could buy a pair. The shoes sold for a few hundred dollars but are now being traded for up to A$.

This quest to obtain limited edition sneakers designed by rapper Kanye West is not an isolated phenomenon. People have long gone to extreme lengths to get their hands on the latest kicks.

Gofar contains other products and information you need, so please check it out.

There have been reports of sneaker violence since the s.

For those wishing to form a more orderly queue, the internet has responded with news services and dedicated message boards to help people get the latest kicks. Other sites treat sneakers like stock market commodities.

But how does society&#;s sneaker love tally with our awareness of the environmental and human cost of consumerism?

Photo: AFP

A brief history

The first sneakers appeared in s England, when Liverpool Rubber bonded a canvas outer onto a vulcanised rubber sole, creating the original sand shoe for the Victorian middle classes to wear on the beach.

Different styles of the shoe were developed in the UK and the US throughout the 19th century to respond to athletic pursuits like running, tennis, jumping and sailing. The term &#;sneaker&#; was coined in the US in the to describe the shoe because it was noiseless. Athletes in Paris wore sneakers at the first modern Olympic Games in .

The American pro-basketball player Charles H. Taylor, passionately promoted the sneakers designed by Marquis M. Converse in . By , Taylor&#;s improvements had been incorporated into the shoe, his signature added to their design, and Converse &#;Chucks&#; have remained unchanged since.

Adidas was founded by the Dassler brothers in Germany in , and Puma was founded in when the Dassler brothers split. Onitsuka Tiger (ASICS) were founded in Japan in and Reebok started making sneakers in . New Balance started creating their &#;Trackster&#; sneakers in , and Nike was founded in . At every point, sneakers were created to support athletes, but also to promote lifestyles that connected leisure with physical activity.

Since the s, sneakers have been linked to skateboarding and hip-hop culture, including break dancing; urban pursuits that require a high degree of comfort and ease of movement. The explosion of hip-hop from the mid-s and its global dominance in the s meant that sneakers quickly became a visual symbol of hip-hop and a symbol of its separation from the mainstream.

Run DMC&#;s track, My Adidas was as much about the band&#;s love for sneakers as it was about how quickly people judged black youth who wore sneakers to be troublemakers.

Likewise, when rave culture blossomed in the s and s, sneakers became the footwear of choice for the 24-hour party people who dressed to sweat.

Sneakers today

The current nostalgia in sneakers extends to design imagery, styles, and colour combinations. In April this year, Adidas issued a limited edition version of the My Adidas Superstar sneaker.

Luxury brands have also taken note, capitalising on historical references, status concerns and a relaxation in social dress codes.

Leading high-fashion brands, including Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga now consider sneakers a must-have fashion item in their collections.

Photo: AFP

Balenciaga&#;s recent Triple S sneakers (priced at around A$) echo the platform sneaker trends of the s, with the company&#;s CEO Cédric Charbit, noting &#;sneakers &#; blend nicely with the way we live&#;.

Where once s women swapped their commuter sneakers for power heels at the office, people now wear their sneakers all day.

Charbit believes the sneaker has become, &#;very versatile, it goes from day to night, it goes for the weekend, it goes for work&#;.

Sustainability and ethical production

While many sneaker fans continue to prioritise style over environmental concerns, others are demanding transparency around the ethics and impact of production, leading to the rise of the sustainable sneaker.

Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, favours Veja sneakers made from wild Amazonian rainforest rubber.

Adidas has been making sneakers using recycled ocean plastic since , but says it wants to go further. It launched the Futurecraft Loop in April, a sneaker made exclusively from 100 percent reusable Thermoplastic polyurethane that can be recycled again and again.

Adidas, Brooks, Reebok, and Salomon showed positive working conditions at their factories in a survey, but there was still a problem with low wages.

Sites like the Good Shopping Guide can help customers can make more informed choices. But sustainable fashion expert Mark Liu notes, &#;Sneakers are still extremely problematic because of all their toxic petrochemical components, glues and the amount of greenwash in the industry&#;.

Supply and demand

One key to enduring sneaker love is scarcity. Adidas only released of their limited-edition My Adidas Superstar shoes. West also generates exclusivity with low production numbers &#; only 40,000 pairs of Yeezys are made worldwide for each drop and shops in Australia may only have 25 pairs of each incarnation.

The combination of rarity, and the myriad cultural meanings embedded in sneakers creates an emotional pull for collectors like DJ Jerome Salele&#;a that ties them to sneaker, hip-hop, skater and rave communities around the globe.

The ultimate sneaker is a comfortable vehicle for the body to move through the world that expresses the wearer&#;s 

By Emily Brayshaw, Lecturer, Fashion and Design History, Theory, and Thinking, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For more information, please visit Canvas Sneaker Manufacturers.