Kids Shoes, A Fashion Statement

They used to be something that protected the feet, kept them warm, but just as importantly dry, but kids shoes have now become a fashion statement. Children now look to ensure their appearance matches their heroes, whether soccer stars, or other sportsmen, film stars or their favourite singers.

Television images are brought to us more and more, and those images imprint ideas in the minds of young and old.

There is creativity to match as never before and pity the poor child who falls behind in the style race.

Shoes began as protective animal skins tied around the foot, developed slowly over the centuries, but have finally become an item available in many colours, designs and materials; natural as well as synthetic.

Fashion sense is not exclusively the province of modern times. The courtiers of many a European Throne vied to outdo each other as new ideas came from the lands overseas that discovery brought closer to them.

Designs and ideas spread only slowly. These were the Ages of the carriage and the horse on land, the written word and drawing on parchment, and the wooden ship at sea.

Our lives are in an age of jet aircraft, television, film and internet. Everything is available in an instant and now the world is such a small place!

It is a phenomenon of recent decades and the imaginative entrepreneurs who saw the opportunities of such a large marketplace were the ones whose fortunes were made almost overnight.

The fashion industry grew, and superficially it revolved around the ladies, but it was not more than a step further to realise that the grown woman was only a proportion of the population, and hence of the marketplace. In medieval times men's fashion was as important as women's. Like the animal kingdom, the male of the species would strut around like peacocks in all their finery. For most of the twentieth century man wore mainly drab functional clothing and it wasn't till the sixties that this began to change.

Advertising and marketing soon ensured that demand for product came from all sectors of society, and all ages. Manufacturers geared to making mass produced product, fashionable women's and men's shoes for example, already had the capacity to produce other products if the manufacturing techniques were similar.

It was not too much of a leap of faith to expand their ranges to kids shoes. Why would the child not demand of its parents something to keep apace with fashion, to match the nice new dress, the trendy jeans and the polo shirt. After all, parents take great pride in their children, and their children's appearances.

The media, television, internet, pop concert and film not only assist in the creation of fashion and the demand for it but they also help to sustain that demand on a daily basis.