winklepicker

a shoe with a pointed toe

TRANSLATION

winklepickers = spitze Schuhe

STATISTICS

IN THE PRESS

Underground is a British fashion brand which sells authentic rock'n'roll-inspired Creeper, Sneaker, WINKLEPICKER, Steel Cap Boots and Shoes.

www.underground-england.co.uk

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Fifty Shoes that Changed the World
There was a fashion for wearing pointed shoes, or poulaines, among Europe's elite in medieval times, but the modern WINKLEPICKER first emerged in the 1920s and became popular in the 60s.

Design Museum

Did you
know?

winklepicker
noun (Brit.)

- a shoe with a sharp-pointed toe

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Winklepickers, or winkle pickers, are a style of shoe or boot worn from the 1950s onward by male and female British rock and roll fans. The feature that gives both the boot and shoe their name is the very sharp and long pointed toe, reminiscent of medieval footwear and approximately the same as the long pointed toes on some women's high-fashion shoes and boots in the late 2000s.

The extremely pointed toe was called the winkle picker because in England periwinkle snails, or winkles, are a popular seaside snack which is eaten using a pin or other pointed object to extract the soft parts out of the coiled shell carefully, hence the phrase: "to winkle something out", and based on that, winklepickers became a humorous name for shoes with a very pointed tip.

Other countries had other humorous names, e.g. in Norway and Sweden they were called myggjagere/myggjagare, literally "Mosquito Chasers".

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