From: Suzi Clarke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sorry Marc, they may have originally been a man's style, but I was wearing them in the '50's, and they were called winkle pickers then. I am old enough to have been wearing so called fashion in the 50's. I didn't wear them for long, or often, as they hurt my feet!! (Incidentally, at about that age, I was given a pair of my Grandma's shoes, possibly from the First World War, which had long points - and I couldn't wear them either...
Why sorry? It's nothing but a different interpretation of the evidence :) Nothing to be sorry about.
And just because a fashion item that was initially used by one gender winds up being used for the other (or even the *name* for a fashion item , etc) that later use has no bearing on it's origins.
I will say that fashion items do seem to flow more from being used by men to being used by both genders, than they do the other way. I would tend to speculate that traditionally men are more reluctant to risk looking feminine than women are to risk looking masculine. There are of course notable exceptions to this, but even those seem less likely to make it into widespread culture.
As winklepickers in the 50s were, on men, a part of a certain macho image, so it just seems unlikely to me that it was something they got from women's fashion and adapted.
Actually, I'm thinking the Americans and British picked it up from the Italians, but my memory may be playing tricks on me here.
Marc _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
