Archaevintage

This perfectly preserved 5,000 year old shoe was discovered in an Armenian cave. It has blown away researchers due to its excellent condition relative to its age.
The shoe, made from vegetable tanned cow hide dated back to 3500BC (The Chalcolithic period), is constructed of a single piece and was tailored made to fit its owners foot.
This archeological discovery reinforces our belief that well crafted products made from excellent materials are here to last. We wonder if 5000 years from now a Dimitri bag would be found in a cave in HK with a Leica camera and Fiat 500 keys in it. 

From the NY Times: "Perfectly preserved under layers of sheep dung (who needs cedar closets?), the shoe, made of cowhide and tanned with oil from a plant or vegetable, is about 5,500 years old, older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, scientists say. Leather laces crisscross through numerous leather eyelets, and it was worn on the right foot; there is no word on the left shoe.
While the shoe more closely resembles an L. L.Bean-type soft-soled walking shoe than anything by Jimmy Choo, “these were probably quite expensive shoes, made of leather, very high quality,” said one of the lead scientists, Gregory Areshian, of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles."

The oldest known footwear in the world, to the present time, are sandals made of plant material, that were found in a cave in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri in the US. Other contemporaneous sandals were found in the Cave of the Warrior, Judean Desert, Israel, but these were not directly dated, so that their age is based on various other associated artefacts found in the cave.

Interestingly, the shoe is very similar to the 'pampooties' worn on the Aran Islands (in the West of Ireland) up to the 1950s. "In fact, enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of this shoe and those found across Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse region," said lead author of the research, Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.