Few historians of the modern era have paid attention to the significance of feet and footwear in everyday life. The social anthropologist Tim Ingold has demonstrated how a grounded, bottom-up history from below can enlighten often overlooked aspects of society and culture. Thomas Turner's The Sports Shoe is a fine example of this perspective.

No mere history of shoemaking in the modern world, what Turner provides is a novel angle on the history of globalization, manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and the marketing of desire. The book contributes to a wider interest in material histories and embodiment. Consideration of the feet necessarily engages with the senses, and this book addresses touch, sound, and sight in terms of the comfort achieved through carefully observed design, the quietness of rubber soles, and the aesthetics of style and branding. While the sense of smell is addressed through one marketing advertisement that claimed the potential of a brand of shoes to overcome smelly feet, the vivid and colorful illustrations seem to convey the familiar odors of feet, rubber, and plastics. This is as much a sensory history as a history of industrial design in a global context.

Addressing the emergence of consumer identity via footwear over the period from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the present day, Turner demonstrates how the manufacturing and wearing of sports shoes was shaped by all the “complexities and contradictions of the modern world” (258). He recognizes that the spread of mass education across the industrial world stimulated mass participation in sports activities and the subsequent explosion of demand for suitable footwear (57).

A chronology of sports shoe manufacturing takes the reader from the onset of mass fabrication at the end of the nineteenth century through a prism of the main sports accessible to the nonathlete or amateur. The functional and stylistic requirements of a range of sports includes some small references to cricket, cycling, golf, mountain climbing, fishing, and yachting. The focus of the book, however, is on competitive sports such as lawn tennis, basketball, and football, as well as individual sporting activities such as running for leisure and fitness. In this engaging text, Turner demonstrates how the cladding of the feet in functional, comfortable, and stylish shoes mattered not only toward sporting success but also in establishing and promoting significant aspects of individual and collective identity.

This is a scholarly history of the sports shoe as a social and cultural practice, and as would any author of a good historical work, Turner addresses and reveals a rich context of associations, interpretations, and implications of writing history literally from the ground up. For example, he suggests the production of cheaper rubber (non-vulcanized) “crepe” soles in the 1920s “echoed the functionality of modernist architecture” (53).

In detailing the manufacturing and marketing processes, Turner addresses the pivotal relationship of industry and empire. The sourcing of rubber as a vital element in the manufacturing process relied on colonial relations and for Britain extraordinary efforts to secure the flow of this material. Among the many marketing posters reproduced in the book is a 1926 advertisement for a rubber company showing a colonial worker collecting rubber from a tree, interposed with a drawing of a sports shoe, with the caption “without this tree modern athletics would be impossible” (45). We learn how essential vulcanized rubber was to provide the durability and flexibility required by the athlete and how technological advanced resulted in lighter and cheaper soles. Meanwhile, the uppers, be they leather, canvas, or, later, various forms of plastics, spoke their own language through decoration and style. The gender dimension to this is consistent over time: in the early days of lawn tennis, specialist shoes were marketed to nonprofessionals as well as elite players. For men of the upper levels of society, ornamental footwear afforded them a “performance of masculinity” (24). Women, on the other hand were somewhat divided as to the insistence that heels be worn to protect their femininity that otherwise might be endangered by flat soles, the latter of which some women regarded as “an active form of beauty” (27).

Through detailing family histories of production of sports shoes, Turner reveals a complex history of association of the modern state with sports and physical fitness. Readers will be familiar with the brand names Adidas and Puma but will learn in this book how Adolf Dassler began making sports shoes in his mother's kitchen in southern Germany, profiting during the war making shoes for Wehrmacht. Dassler went on to register the brand name Adidas while his estranged brother Rudolf established Puma. Adolf played football. His personal experience led him to experiment with the design of lighter football boots, supplying the national team. By the mid-1950s Adidas supplied the world (180).

Postwar state concern with physical fitness, expressed in fears about the “soft American,” stimulated the emerging market in less competitive, individual sports activities such as running (95). Turner situates the origin of jogging in the context of individual counterculture of late 1960s west coast America and traces the worldwide expansion of this market through sports clothing more generally.

Turner demonstrates how the extreme variety, made possible in the presence of small visual features in the design of sports shoes, tended to encourage cultural associations and meaning to be accrued. This was especially the case in youth cultures for whom the style and mode of wearing certain sports shoes was often a key sign of belonging. This is revealed through a fascinating discussion of the history of skateboarding and hip-hop and other youth music cultures.

It is often the overlooked and overfamiliar features of modern life that, when considered seriously, cast new light on our understanding of the past. This is a history of conspicuous consumption, of design, and desire. It is a big and beautiful book that is a valuable contribution to a cultural history of the modern world.