'So manly and ornamental': shoe buckles and Britain's eighteenth century

The shoe buckle of the eighteenth century is an alien object today. At the time, shoes were manufactured without fastenings and the buckle was purchased separately. This offered opportunities for decoration, particularly for men, whose shoes were otherwise plain and unchanging. Over the course of the century, buckles grew larger and more elaborate, reaching their apogee in the ‘Artois’ style of the 1780s. In the wake of the French Revolution, buckles came to be associated with effeminacy and the excesses of the aristocracy, so fell from fashion. This article explores the roles of gender and class in this story, and will challenge the usual association of the buckle with foppery, demonstrating that they were consistent with mainstream masculinities until the 1790s. In order to understand the shoe buckle’s significance, the article engages with it as a material artefact. With their intricate mechanisms, complex processes of fastening, and roles in meaningful rituals, shoe buckles give us an insight into haptic practices and the embodiment of gender. The article therefore makes the case that shoe buckles were characteristic of masculinities, material practices and social identities in eighteenth-century Britain.