![]() From an early age, he was immersed in music and dance, with his mother working as a dance instructor and his father running a dance supply retail and wholesale business. Wild was born in Lancashire and is third-generation Irish-British on both parents’ sides and Corr’s itself is named after his mother’s Irish maiden name. So, he decided to found a company of his own that would borrow and adapt these new technologies and apply them to Irish Dance shoes. Certainly the shoes had come a long way from their basic oxford origins, but, Wild says, most shoes he was seeing seemed to be a decade or two behind the types of professional shoes seen at the level of Broadway or West End productions. When Julian Wild founded Corr’s Irish Dance in 2001, new technology and changes to the regulations governing shoe size and material by the Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha allowed for greater flexibility in shoe design and comfort. And it is from these developments that Corr’s Irish Dance became the first U.S.-based company to introduce external dance shoe design and technology to modern Irish Dance shoes manufacturing. Meanwhile, the dance shoes for other styles of professional dance, such as ballroom, jazz, and ballet, had begun to adopt new technology like foam insocks for padded comfort, Cambrelle linings for moisture wicking, toe blocks for increased foot support when going on pointe, and heel padding to help reduce blisters. This form of construction, tingles and all, endured through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The effect of this rigid construction was a very stiff shoe that, while supportive, offered significantly more weight and less comfort to the dancers, who were required to spend hours upon hours breaking in these shoes before they could be worn for practice or competition. This was achieved with two complementary techniques-first, using thick, unlined and inflexible pigskin for the uppers and second, by adding a second layer of thick belly leather to the insole, creating a double sole resistant to bending at the arch when on pointe. Soon, a stiffer shoe became standard, the thinking being that it would be easier for dancers to get up on their toes with a more rigid shoe. Dancers would simply wear the outfit that they normally wore to church and dance bare foot.” And, for dances that necessitated hard shoes, “metal panels and even nails would have been attached to the sole of the dancers own shoes to allow them to make the ‘bangs’ and ‘taps’ required.”īy the mid-20th century, companies began making specialized versions of these shoes that consisted of more-or-less standard leather oxford shoes modified with thick layered leather heels and added toe tips set with specialized tingle nails to produce the sound. But dedicated Irish Dance footwear is a much more recent development.Īccording to Melissa Russell, who operates the online Irish culture resource The Emerald Isle, “step dancers in the 18th and 19th centuries wore their Sunday best. Irish Dance has a long and storied history, dating back millennia. And if you own a split sole hard shoe, or a split sole soft shoe, or love the foam padding in any of your Irish Dance shoes, or the heel guard, or the inside angle of the toe chip on your hard shoes, you have Julian Wild of Corr’s Irish Dance to thank. One manufacturer stands out for integrating pioneering modern shoe technology in traditional Irish Dance shoes. ![]() ![]() Modern Irish Dance shoes have come a long way from their origins. with Julian Wild, founder of Corr's Irish Shoes The History behind Modern Irish Dance Shoes.
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