Chopine
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Chopine
A chopine is a type of women’s platform shoe that was popular in the 15th 16th and 17th centuries. Chopines were originally used as a patten clog or overshoe to protect the shoes and dress from mud and street soil.
Chopines were popularly worn in Venice by both courtesans and patrician women from ca. 14001700. Besides their practical uses the height of the chopine became a symbolic reference to the cultural and social standing of the wearer; the higher the chopine the higher the status of the wearer. High chopines allowed a woman to literally and figuratively tower over others.
lt;a href=”http://www.himfr.com/buymilano_suitsmilano suitslt;/agt;During the Renaissance chopines became an article of women’s fashion and were made increasingly taller; some extant examples are over 20 inches 50 cm high.1 Surviving chopines are typically made of wood or cork and those in the Spanish style were sometimes banded about with metal. Extant pieces are covered with leather brocades or jewelembroidered velvet. Often the fabric of the chopine matched the dress or the shoe but not always.
According to some scholars chopines caused an unstable and inelegant gait. Women wearing them were generally accompanied by a servant or attendant on whom they could balance themselves. 2 Other scholars have argued that with practice a woman could walk and even dance gracefully. In his dancing manual Nobilit di dame 1600 the Italian dancing master Fabritio Caroso writes that with care a woman practiced in wearing her chopines could move ith grace seemliness and beauty and even “dance flourishes and galliard variations”. Chopines were usually put on with the help of two servants.
In the fifteenth century chopines were also the style in Spain. Their popularity in Spain was so great that the larger part of the nation’s cork supplies went towards production of the shoes. Some argue that the style originated in Spain as there are many extant examples and a great amount of pictorial and written reference going back to the 14th century 5 Chopines of the Spanish style were more often conical and symmetric while their Venetian counterparts are much more artistically carved. That is not to say however that Spanish chopines were not adorned; on the contrary there is evidence of jeweling gilt lettering along the surround the material covering the cork or wooden base tooling and embroidery on Spanish chopines.
There are a great deal of cognates of the word chopine chapiney choppins etc. however neither the word chopine nor any word similar to it chioppino cioppino etc appears in either Florio’s 1598 or 1611 dictionary. The Italian word instead seems to be “zoccoli” which likely comes from the Italian word “zocco” meaning a stump or a block of wood. Florio does however use the word “chopinos” in his English definition of zoccoli.
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