A Novel Approach Towards Design and Development of Indian Men’s Workplace Casual Footwear with Specific Reference to Sizing

In Indian footwear sector, casual footwear involves those preferred by people for daily wear in schools, colleges or workplace, etc. Casual footwear dominates the market followed by mass footwear. The common styles of men’s workplace casual footwear are moccasin, boot, derby, oxford, brogue, sneaker and gore shoe. While footwear size is obviously important, we tend to overmagnify its importance by the assumption that if the footwear is the right size it will automatically deliver proper fit. From the stand point of the fitter, footwear size consists primarily of two measurements: overall length and ball width. These measurements however do not indicate the true size of the foot or the footwear. Heel width, waist girth, instep, heel to ball, arch length also come in “sizes”. The footwear is presumably “sized” in its various sections to match the corresponding sections of the foot. Thus, the primary objective of the research is to assess lasts of Indian men’s workplace casual footwear including aspects like match of toe shapes and redesign of lasts along with fitness assessment and other aspects closely related to long-term comfort which may be considered in order to improve model accuracy. In order to achieve this demographic and morphological characteristic of feet of subjects belonging to Delhi NCT region were collected. Morphological characteristics were collected using SATRA foot measurement system. Since styles of workplace casual footwear includes boots, certain anthropometric dimensions of the leg were also collected using the procedure outlined in ISO 8559:1989(En) standards.