Mastery of Design: A Pair of Diamond Shoe Buckles, 1750

Shoe Buckles
1750
Diamonds, Sapphires, Silver, Gold, Steel
The Victoria & Albert Museum

If you’re going to have ornate, colorful shoes, you might as well go the extra mile and hang some diamonds on them. In this instance, we have a pair of diamond shoe buckles from 1750. These would have been worn on shoes which were shaped something like those pictured below—only without the ribbons. These buckles feature brilliant-cut diamonds and sapphires, set in silver and gold with steel prongs.

Shoe buckles were worn by both men and women during the Eighteenth Century and while msot people wore simple buckles, some were elaborately decorated. Very often, buckles were set with paste or glass stones since, let’s face it, shoes really get quite dirty. But, those who had money to spare and didn’t care if their diamonds got muddy would wear the real thing. Few examples of shoe buckles set with precious stones have survived. To begin with, there weren’t that many to begin with. And, secondly, most of those were broken apart later to make other pieces of jewelry after the shoe buckle fell out of fashion.

This particular pair of buckles was formerly part of the Russian Crown Jewels. See, if you’re a tsar, you can wear diamonds on your feet. They were sold by the Bolshevik government after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Dame Joan Evans owned them for awhile and donated them to the V&A in 1961.