Fanciful Origins - Chapter 113: Bucket Boots

[Katharine Kanter]

Gang, we have found it.

Forget Praxiteles, and all that.

Chapter 113 in Fanciful Origins to the Turn-Out has arrived.

The author of these lines herewith launches a Contest (the POB Internal Concours will be NOTHING compared to this):

Who can come up with the Most Fanciful Origin to the Turn-Out?

Our first contestant, from Italy, proposes the following, which really is a scream:

"La danza classica si basa sull'en dehors perché nasce nelle corti e i cortigiani che danzavano portavano le punte verso l'esterno per mostrare meglio i fiocchi delle scarpe"" ("classical dance uses the en-dehors, because the courtisans would turn out their toes, the better to show off the ribbons decorating their shoe")

But I have gone that one better.

Gang, it's BUCKET-BOOTS!

Found in Felicity Gray's Manual of 1952:


"This position (the turn-out - editor's note) can look very odd and unnatural in the classroom. How did it come to be adopted as the basic foundation of all ballet dancing? (...)

"In the early seventeenth Century, the cavaliers of France all wore, as the height of fashion, heavy bucket-shaped cavalary bookts. It was quite impossible in those boots to walk as one does to-day, brushing one leg past the other; the legs had to be swung out and round in a small arc to avoid the wide boot tops and, as the foot came to the ground, the toes quite naturally turned out. One can see something of the same style of walk to-day in fishermen, who have rolled their big rubber waders down below the knee.

"Thus, the walk of the cavalier developed into the swagger of the Three Musketeers. Even after the fashion of these boots had passed, as fashions do, the turned-out position of the feet continued to be cultivated...; the women had to copy the men’s style, and so came to adopt the Turn-Out for themselves.”



(I've no idea how to put up a link to an Image on the Internet, but there are great pix of cavalier bucket-boots out there.)