footcloths

Description

Army foot wraps are two pieces of flannel fabric 45x90 cm. Plain weave flannel with sparse pile. Heat-saving, soft, pleasant to the touch material, absorbs moisture very well. This material has historically (since the time of Peter I) been used for the manufacture of underwear and foot wraps in Russia (and other countries).

Foot wraps are convenient to wear with high-boots or with shoes that do not have lacing or other tight fasteners. They protect your feet well from chafing with the inner parts of your shoes.

Historical reference.

Foot wraps for shoes have been around for so long that exact time of their appearance is not known. At the end of the first millennium, Slavic and Finnish tribes wore foot wraps (called “onuchi”) along with bast shoes.

They were used when wearing high-boots in many armies of the world. A gradual shift away from this practice began in the second half of the 20th century as boots were replaced with lace-up boots, which were no longer worn with foot wraps, but with socks.

In many countries, foot wraps are associated with Russia. So the French name for foot wraps “chaussette russe” literally translates as “russian sock”.

In Russia, foot wraps were used for several centuries until the 2010s.

Despite the convenience of modern socks, foot wraps also have their advantages:

• footcloth dries faster and copes well with moisture;
• if the fabric is frayed or wet in some place, the problem can be quickly solved by changing dry side to the foot.

The disadvantage of foot wraps is the difficulty of wrapping. It is important to make it right, so that the footcloth would not untie while walking in boots. The condition of the soldier’s feet depended on how well the foot wraps were wrapped.

The pictures below show winding patterns for footcloths for the Russian and German armies.

Scheme for winding foot wraps.

Scheme for winding foot wraps for German army soldiers.

You need to wrap the footcloth starting from the toe. When wrapping footcloths around your legs, avoid the formation of rough folds and scars so that they fit your legs like stockings.

Sources: wikipedia.org, dzen.ru, drive2.ru, static.tildacdn.com, avatars.dzeninfra.ru.