The soft elk skin, deerskin or buffalo skin slippers worn by Native Americans and known widely as moccasins were a fashion of shoe shared by many different tribes over time. The seemingly simple design of moccasins, however, was actually so nuanced that Native Americans could attribute moccasin footprints to different tribes and identify one another accordingly. Subtle variations in stitching or fringe detailing or the finishing of the heel could distinguish one pair of footprints from another. Beyond this, the decorative detailing in beadwork or quill design on the front tab, or vamp, of the moccasin would also signal origins or affiliation.
The shoes are remarkably efficient in design and would have been well-suited to different geographical and climate conditions. They were also extremely well crafted in supple leather with careful stitching to allow for ease of wear as much as for sensitivity to the landscape, something that would have been essential to Native Americans so skilled at traversing the land and tracking things on foot. Those tribes to the west that lived in drier, more rugged terrain would have had shoes made of tougher leather with soles to match and would be constructed of two or more pieces of leather for sole and upper. Tribes further east would have relied on soft-soled moccasins, typically constructed of one piece of hide and sewn with seams at the sides or at the top.
The word moccasin in association with Native American footwear has been adopted by the greater American public but it was never a universally understood word within the different Native American tribes. Moccasin was the word for shoe in the Virginia Algonquian language and was passed into English as a generalization through the encounters early English settlers had with the native community. Captain John Smith of the Jamestown settlement is attributed with noting the translation in his 1612 glossary, ‘mockasins: shoes.’ In actuality, each tribe used words in their own language or dialect to signify shoe/slipper and it is coincidence that has made ‘moccasin’ the lasting word in English. It is more than coincidence and surely a tribute to the beauty of the design and image of the moccasin that it has been preserved as a style of shoe until today and continues to permeate the broader fashion market.
At the turn of the 20th century, the advent of vehicular transportation would mark the experience of the independent American spirit as the United States entered a new era of mobility. The first cars and motorcycles emerged at the beginning of the 1900’s and quickly multiplied in number as manufacture improved and as Americans came to embrace the freedom of motorized travel. What arose in tandem with developments in machinery, particularly in the case of motorcycles, was a fashion that underlined the industry behind the vehicle and promised a sense of the adventurous future that lay ahead.
The late 1800’s saw the incremental adjustments to the bicycle form that eventually led to the motorized cycle, produced by several different companies in the 1910’s and 20’s, with its singular mechanisms and engine development. In the late 1920’s a company from New York City produced a jacket inspired by the motorcycle’s popularity and that would become identified ever after with the motorcycle lifestyle. The leather motorcycle jacket, called the Perfecto by the New York company, was reminiscent of a military jacket with a short cut and a form that narrowed toward the waist but was offset in its serious tone by the zipper closure at the front and the zipper breast pocket.
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The style quickly became associated with the motorcycle and after World War II became a staple of a lifestyle that not only told a story of adventure and rugged independence but also of comradery among those who sought this freedom of the road. Later, not surprisingly, it would be taken up as an emblem of independence by the young generations in the dawning age of rock and roll and teenage rebellion.
*image: BMW R32 at 2006 MOA international rally |
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