Chopine (pronounced choh-peen or chop-in)
(1) A shoe having a thick sole, usually of cork, suggesting a short stilt, worn especially by women in Europe in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries and said to have been introduced from the Ottoman Empire.
(2) A bottle of wine (usually Bordeaux) containing 250 ml, 1/3 of the volume of a standard bottle.
1570–1580: From the Middle French chapin, from the Old Spanish chapín (type of high shoe or clog, raised by means of a cork sole), from chapa (plate of metal), the construct being chap(a) (from the Middle French chape) + -in (the adjectival suffix). The original, the Old Spanish chapín, was probably imitative of the sound made by the shoe when walking. Dictionaries note a number of cognates of chopine including choppins & chapiney but, as might be imagined, it must have been a word in limited use (by cobblers, fashionistas etc) because there are no entries for the word (or similar forms such as cioppino or choppino) in English / Italian dictionaries of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries; perhaps it was at the time: "The shoe that dare not speak its name". It's possible the equivalent in Renaissance Italian was zoccolo (familiar as the English plural "clogs") which may come from the Italian zocco (stump or block of wood) but adding to the murkiness, in one English / Italian dictionary, the word chopinos appears in the definition of the plural zoccoli. Chopine is a noun; the noun plural is chopines.
Unfortunately, chopiner is not an English noun meaning “one who makes or wears chopines” but a French verb meaning “to drink to excess” while the English adjective Chopinian carries the sense “of or pertaining to the Polish composer & virtuoso pianist Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)”. A macabre footnote in Chopin's story is that Hans Frank (1900–1946; Nazi lawyer and governor of the General Government (1939-1945) in German-occupied Poland during World War II), whose rule in Nazi-occupied Poland was an appalling and bloody tale of corruption and depravity, when on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in all seriousness (as an experienced trial lawyer) offered in mitigation for his conduct the fact he'd established in Kraków a Chopin Museum, something he noted: “the Poles had never managed to do”. The belated attempt at redemption came apparently at the instigation of Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945; Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda 1933-1945) who, although as evil as any of the Nazis, was at least clear-headed enough to understand carrots were in occupied territories at least as useful as sticks.
Acting under instruction from Berlin, Frank’s regime actively had attempted to eradicate Polish culture and while his methods were never subtle, the worst excesses included mass-murder of “the intelligentsia” (writers, artists, journalists, academics, priests etc) but the governor-general, bizarrely, had a personal obsession with Chopin, based on a genuine fondness for the music and many had been drawn to what been described as its “quasi-improvised” quality; the French composer Georges Bizet (1838–1875) spoke of Chopin’s work as “…charming, strange, unique, inimitable”. Frank too clearly was charmed but understood the long dead composer would need to be “Germanized” to be acceptable in the Third Reich (1933-1945), taking measures such as spelling his name in a Germanic-sounding “Schopping” and banning performances of his compositions for Polish audiences. The centrepiece of this improbable Nazi attempt at cult-creation was what Frank called the “temporary” Chopin Museum in his official headquarters at Wawel Castle in Kraków, a permanent structure to be erected once Germany had won the war. In typical Nazi style, Frank dispatched his (by then well-experienced) agents to loot occupied Europe for Chopin artifacts, manuscripts, letters, death masks and memorabilia, managing to acquire (ie steal) even an original Pleyel grand piano that had belonged to the composer. Despite that interest, in May 1940 he had made only a token attempt to prevent the destruction of the famous bronze Chopin Monument in Warsaw's Łazienki Park, the 16-ton statue cut into pieces and melted down for the benefit of the German war machine.
For the museum’s opening ceremony, Frank personally selected Ludmilla Berkwic (1910–2005), a fine Polish concert pianist and piano teacher who, on Chopin’s Pleyel, preformed several pieces for an audience of high-ranking Nazis, the recital very well-received. Unfortunately, Frank’s staff hadn’t dug too deep and what they failed to detect was that Ms Berkwic had since the start of the war being living under false papers because her father's family was Jewish. That might have gone undetected were it not for Dr Goebbels having arranged for the performance to be filmed and, in an attempt to show how benign was Nazi rule in Poland, distributed throughout Europe on propaganda newsreels. By 1943 he probably realized that might be a futile project but his energy for the Sisyphean task never waned. However, an unexpected consequence of the publicity was it prompted one of Ms Berkwic’s jealous rivals to denounce her for having Jewish heritage. That forced her and her mother to obtain from the Polish Underground new sets of forged papers and, strange as it sounds, they fled to Germany where they could be absorbed into the millions of captive Polish workers. Hiding, as it were, “in plain sight”, she survived the war working in a munitions factory and in 1947 emigrated to the US, setting in New York. Frank’s gesture did not make much impression on the judges of the IMT (International Military Tribunal) sitting for the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946): They convicted him on counts three (war crimes) and four (crimes against humanity) and handed down a sentence of death by hanging. As a trained lawyer, Frank was at least a realist, the prison psychologist recording that when asked his reaction to the verdict, Frank had smiled when answering: “I deserved it and I expected it.” Unlike the most recalcitrant of the defendants, he seemed aware too of the magnitude of the crimes being tried, admitting: “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.” Some of what Frank stole for “his” Chopin Museum was recovered and today, the most comprehensive collection of the composer's memorabilia is housed in the official Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw, established in 1954 and operated by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.
The ultimate platform shoe
Chopines began as a purely functional device; a means of raising women’s shoes and the hems of their dresses above the dirt and filth in which they were often compelled to walk; in the age of horse-drawn transport, streets sometimes were "rivers of blood, mud and horseshit". It's said the chopines were brought to Europe by traders from the Ottoman Empire where they'd been worn in bath houses by concubines, courtesans and others, the speculation being they were originally a modestly proportioned device designed as a health measure, a means of protecting the feet from infection, bath houses being warm, dark and moist, the perfect incubation environment for bacteria. As sometimes happens, they became a status symbol with prestige determined by their elevation, the tallest extant examples reaching 20 inches (508 mm) although some historians claim they were built as much as ten inches (254 mm) higher. Students of the art suspect that if true, such things may have been constructed for shop-window displays rather than being worn because at that height they're really "stilts". Beyond a certain height, practicality (ie stability) would certainly have become marginal but there's evidence highly stylized examples were worn outside the bath house on ceremonial occasions, the wearer presumably "mostly static". Chopines were most popular in Spain and Italy in the late sixteenth century and when they spread to England, they were sometimes referred to as "the Venice" because of the perception that was their city of origin, a notion that seems to have arisen because of their mention in widely-read travel journals of the age; Venice was a popular destination for such travellers. Their impracticality must have made them a niche item because they never became part of any defined English costume or style of dress but whether alpha-males objected to women suddenly appearing taller is lost to history.
Variations on a theme of chopine.
As shoes, they had a short life because their sheer size dictated they be made from lightweight materials like cork and wood although some surviving examples do have a metal framework. The style, in a less extreme form, was briefly revived with the cork-soled platform soles of the 1970s which had the effect of creating a short-lived investment bubble in the Portuguese cork industry although, as economic theory would predict, as the craze faded a Portuguese "cork glut" saw prices collapse. The absurdity of the style attracted the attention of writers:
"It is ridiculous to see how these ladies crawl in and out of their gondolas, by reason of their choppines [clogs]; and what dwarfs they appear when taken down from their wooden scaffolds; of these I saw nearly thirty together, stalking half as high again as the rest of the world." (John Evelyn, diary entry, June 1645)
"By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine." (Hamlet, act 2 scene 2, William Shakespeare, 1602)
"He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine... "(Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922).
Shoes have not since ascended to the heights of the chopines but the attractions of elevation have endured. The lovely elegance of a five-inch stiletto heel of course remains incomparable but while as a piece of design they’re there to be admired, at a certain point a stiletto becomes unstable. As a piece of math, heel stability can be reduced to about as complex a problem in mechanics as one cares to make it, the significant variables being the heel height, heel-tip area, shoe geometry, the wearer’s centre of mass, foot position, ground reaction force, and the stiffness of the shoe & ankle as an encapsulated system. So, the “tipping / stability problem” can be conceptualized (even if individual human variations make it difficult to produce a simple model) and the basic idea is that when standing, ground exerts a “vertical ground-reaction force” through the foot; if the shoe is stable, resultant force falls within the “support polygon” (essentially the area defined by the heel and forefoot contact points). As a general principle, a shoe’s sole being broad and long (thereby distributing forces over a large contact area), what is critical is the heel, a structure with a much smaller contact area. Essentially, the remains stable as long as pressure doesn't move beyond the available support area.
However, the slenderness of the stiletto operates as a multiplier effect, the heel height changes the geometry of the entire foot, not merely the size of the heel. As the heel’s height increases, the foot shifts into plantar flexion causing a movement of the upper body, meaning the centre of mass relative to the heel changes. For any given individual, with enough data points quantified, it would be possible to produce an equation that would find a “point of optimal stability” before increasing a heel's height induces “tipping”. Beyond the “tipping point”, a shoe ceases to be neutrally stable and achieving a static equilibrium isn't possible without muscular compensation or movement. That can be modelled in software but the practical complication is a human is not a rigid object standing atop an always flat, unmoving surface, ankle, foot and leg continually make corrections, often so minute and instinctive they’re imperceptible to the owner of those body parts. Thus, a stiletto can statically be geometrically stable yet dynamically unstable. That’s why heel-tip diameter is so critical in achieving stability and to illustrate that, imagine an example demonstrating not all four-inch (100 mm) stilettos have the same intrinsic stability. Consider two otherwise identical 100 mm stilettos, one with an 8-mm heel tip, one with 20-mm, the latter allowing a greater movement of the centre of pressure before the ground-reaction force reaches the edge of the heel. Math nerds can no doubt run the numbers and what they’d find is the intriguing result that doubling the heel height roughly halves the angular tolerance, while doubling heel-tip radius roughly doubles it. Women used to stilettos of course don’t need an equation to tell them a shoe with an extremely narrow, high heel has a very small stability envelope; the "heelprint" is a vital part of the "footprint".
Hence the frequent use of thicker soles and while opinion can be divided on the look, the elevated platform mechanically is interesting because it allows the heel to be higher while keeping the foot at a less extreme angle; it’s a fudge and not always admired by those for whom the acute angle of the wearer’s foot is one of the most alluring aspects of the stiletto’s aesthetic but if done well, it can be pleasing; it’s not the classic look but needs to be judged on its own terms. An example of the math is one of differentiation: A 120-mm heel with a 30-mm platform doesn't behave like a 120-mm heel on a flat platform; because of the additional height in the sole, the effective pitch (and thus stability) will be something like a shoe with a 90-mm heel and conventional sole. Engineers call this the TBA (true biomechanical angle) and in the practical mechanics of the human foot it's of significance because the foot safely can tolerate only a certain maximum angle of incline angle before the ankle undergoes structural plantarflexion failure (where the foot is extended so straight the ankle loses all lateral muscle control). All this was once a rarely explored exercise in equation-making because shoe designers could tell by looking at design whether it would be practical to wear; they didn’t need the math. Engineers building humanoid robots did however need to do the sums even though they could, if need be, emulate millions of years of evolution and make feet and ankles more accommodating. As the recent Humanoid Robot Olympics (August 2026) in Beijing demonstrated, the billions of dollars invested under the watchful eye of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) must have resulted in many correct calculations because what was achieved was impressive (including breaking the world record for the men's 100 metre sprint). While the CCP surely is interested more in robots for factories and the military than “making a better stiletto”, it’s not impossible a Chinese scientist might gain a Ig Nobel Prize by publishing a by-product of humanoid robot research: the equation for the “perfectly stable stiletto”, designers able to “plug-in” their angles and dimensions meaning the “stability threshold” ceases to be theoretical and becomes just another metric.
Flamingo's Exotic Dancer's boots in baby pink are an example of what can be done if one can cast adrift what's possible from the moorings of what's practical. Available in calf (left), ankle (centre) and thigh (right) length in a variety of heel and sole heights, there's both a commonality of design elements and interchangeability of components, meaning a high degree of production-line rationalization, making the range economic to produce. It should be noted "exotic dancer" is a vocational euphemism so the target market is limited but there may be some demand from non-professionals who can see the potential for "home use".
Wartime shortages of leather forced French cobblers to turn to more readily available materials such as wood or cork when repairing or replacing heels and soles and the improvisation quickly became characteristic of French footwear during the Nazi Occupation. Of course, being French, mere functionalism wasn’t enough and identifiable styles emerged, creating a unique “fashion language”; in other words, a fine example of wartime necessity becoming fashion. Supplies of leather for civilian consumer goods greatly were restricted in many countries during wartime but in places subject to Nazi occupation the deprivations were most severe with the German war machine absorbing the bulk of what was available. Consequently, French shoemakers increasingly substituted wood, cork, textile, straw and whatever artificial materials could be adapted or re-cycled with wooden clogs becoming a common sight.
Constructed on a wooden sole & heel with a raffia upper, the shoe is embellished with a polka-dot ribbon, the only leather component two small cuts for the contact areas of the sole and heel, covered with re-cycled material. Although a product of necessity, the raffia/word combo does sometimes appear still in modern catalogues and, of course, polka-dots never really go out of style. So, material supply was a problem but if anything that may have encouraged designers to explore the possibilities offered by materials not previously exploited. Rather than simply forming blocks of wood or cork into a simple wedge that would have “done the job”, the photographic record makes clear women were wearing raised soles (some quite substantial platforms) and sculptural heels, some as extravagant as was possible within the limitations imposed and augmenting this, ribbons provided considerable scope for decorative variation; in a quirk of the wartime economy, ribbons were for some time among the few materials not subject to rationing. Cobblers proved imaginative and French commerce rose to the occasion, shoe shops developing a fashion vocabulary: semelles compensées (platform/wedge soles) and semelles articulées (articulated soles) among the coinings.
The articulated creations were ingenious attempts to make wooden soles flexible enough for walking and while it was not possible wholly to emulate the behavior of leather, there were partial solutions, one using thin wooden strips and in 1941 there was the more intricate Smelflex in which the articulation interacted with laminated or hinged sections of wood; with dark irony, the occupying authorities noted the system was derived from a German patent. In an example of the way in which populations adapt to circumstances, the look became a recognised fashion phenomenon of Occupation-era France and designers made no attempt to disguise their creations as leather, the wooden soles and heels presented explicitly as a blend of “ingenuity and Parisian elegance.” In an amusing footnote, the shortage of leather and metal did answer the many pre-war complaints about the trend for extremely high, thin talons-échasses (stilt heels) that much pleased the men as they gazed at their drawing boards in Parisian fashion houses but were far from comfortable to wear for much beyond a photo-shoot for a glossy magazine.
Mr Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999, left) with Xi Jinping (b 1953; General Secretary of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and paramount leader of the PRC (People's Republic of China) since 2012, right) (far left), Carla Bruni-Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (b 1967, left) and her husband Nicolas Sarközy (b 1955; President of France 2007-2012, right) (centre left), Marco Rubio (b 1971; US secretary of state since 2025) (centre right) and how it's done (far right).
In politics, the chopine lives on in the form of "elevator shoes" that can "add" as much a four inches (100 mm) to an individual's height through the mechanism of the "built-up" internal heel. Politicians are known to wear them including Mr Putin, Mr Sarközy and Mr Rubio, indeed the latter's use of the shoes was exploited by Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) who coined "little Marco" as his opponent's moniker during the 2016 Republican presidential debates although that use is in abeyance while they maintain their at least temporary friendship. As the elevation increases it's obviously necessary also to add to the upper so (1) the trick is concealed and (2) the ankle retains some lateral support; that's why many elevator shoes are really "elevator boots". Either way, they work best if trousers are cut accordingly; done well, worn by a well practiced wearer, they should be unobtrusive unless closely inspected.
