After some research, I’ve come to the conclusion that fish tank heel 70s platform shoes probably did not exist in the 70s and were just an urban legend.
No “vintage” fishtank heel shoes have ever shown up on ebay, and I’ve looked because I really want a pair. I’ve not found any advertisement campaign for them in period magazines, I’ve never found any “period” images of someone in fish tank heel shoes. All pop culture references to fishtank shoes (like the Simpsons’ Disco Stu and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka) are dated long after the disco era.
I am willing to concede the fact they might have existed, but if they existed at all, the absence of a national ad campaign or manufacturer may mean they were probably the work of individual small scale customizers and crafters. It may additionally, be a case where the urban legend about these shoes’ existence led to the existence of actual ones, as the stories led to a real demand.
My initial conclusion - that if goldfish chunky heels existed, they were not mass-market items but were individual examples created by individual custom shoemakers, iscorrect. It seems there was an interview in 1981 that confirmed their origin.
It seems that the origin of the shoes was a custom pair worn by one man, fashion trendsetter and athlete, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ “Frenchy” Fuqua. Frenchy was known not just for his great athletic skill, but also for being a fashion trendsetter in the disco era. He was among the first, for example, to popularize Musketeer hat wearing.
Many of his outfits are extremely dated, but some of his outfits still look stylish today.
In a 1981 interview with the New York Times, Frenchy Fuqua identified the origin of his goldfish platforms in 1977:
Frenchy laughed. ”Then I get a call from a friend. ‘Frenchy,’ he says, ‘I got somethin’ real sweet for you.’ ” ‘What is it?’ ” ‘How would you like some shoes you can put goldfish in?’ ”I said, ‘Hey, I got an outfit for it.’ ”It was my count suit, with the musketeer hat and gold cane and lavender cape and my valet, which was Franco Harris, who carried the cape and never let it touch ground. And, oh yes, my wine-red knickers. That’s why I switched from goldfish to tropical fish. The tropical-fish colors went better with my outfits.
”The shoes were actually fiberglass clogs with three-inch heels. I had two fish in each shoe. They were a little slippery to walk in, being glass, so you’d have to hold on to a rail when you went down stairs. But my biggest problem was that the fish kept dying. I kept running and adding water, and that just got my socks wet. I experimented with a small pump that ran up my pants, but that was uncomfortable. Finally I gave up the fish but kept the shoes – and put in a terrarium.”
In other words, they were a single item made by a single shoe customizer for a deeply influential and famous person. The very issues he identifies are why they were never a mass-market commodity. Still, I haven’t been able to find any images of Frenchy Fuqua in the goldfish platforms, which is interesting, because, as I often tell people, their belief that “everything is on the internet” is deeply unwarranted arrogance, considering how much no longer exists.
Also, a few people in the comments like @fan-collector-geek mentioned they remember an appearance by a guy on a talk show with aquarium heels. They may be remembering Tony Randall’s appearance on Johnny Carson show in 1977, where supposedly, he wore aquarium heels. I’m inclined to believe this happened as so many people remember it (and the exact same details), but I didn’t discuss it in the post have yet to be able to find any images of it - nothing. It just goes to show that we’re not doing as thorough a job as we should be of recording and archiving pop culture. The 77 date matches the idea the origin of aquarium shoes was Frenchy Fuqua.
As far as I can find aquarium heels were never mass-marketed by any company, but they were produced as show pieces and sold by several specialty shoe stores throughout the 20th century.
The earliest reference I was able to locate to clear heels containing fish was an unnamed Mexican inventor in 1937 who made transparent heels that could be filled with whatever the purchaser desired. His various designs supposedly included “flowers, animals, mermaid, portraits of movie stars, and goldfish swimming about in a liquid filling”.
Both transparent heels and the platform/wedge heel were cutting edge fashion in 1937 (Ferragamo would produce his legendary rainbow platforms for Judy Garland the following year), so it makes sense that people would experiment and combine both.
Countess Irene Ahlefeldt-Laurvig claimed to have worn transparent heels containing live mice to a ball in Paris in 1947, for which she supposedly received a censure from the Danish SPCA. But I can find no source on that other than her own word.
The first fully documented pair of goldfish heels I’ve been able to locate were a display piece produced for the National Shoe Convention in 1951.
Parisian fashion houses produced hollow lucite heels throughout the 1950s, filled with everything from flower petals to champagne. So someone could very well have stuck some goldfish in there at some point, but I so far haven’t located anything except passive “lol fashion is weird” jokes in various magazines and newspaper columns from the era.
The popular novel “The Fame Game” written by Rona Jaffee in 1969 contains the passage: “We’ll recreate the 40s, the Gilda Look. Peplums! Snoods! Platform shoes with ankle straps, wedgies with hollow lucite in which live goldfish swim around - and shoulder pads!” - Which rather interestingly suggests that people in the late 60s erroneously viewed aquarium shoes as a 1940s trend.
In 1972, Geller’s Shoe Store in Hartford, Connecticut displayed a pair of goldfish shoes titled “El Padrino” (The Godfather) - presumably a play on the “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” line from The Godfather, which was released earlier the same year.
A shoe store in Washington, DC reproduced the style the following year and claimed to have sold three pairs for $65 a piece.
Bari’s in Orlando was also marketing goldfish shoes in 1973.
1973 is also the earliest reference I can find of Frenchy Fuqua’s aquarium shoes, suggesting he misremembered the date in his 1981 interview.
Fuqua continued to wear the shoes multiple times throughout the 1970s, changing the fish to coordinate with this ensembles, as he stated in the interview, and appears to have been the person most associated with the trend.
