Forty-four years ago, a Danish yoga instructor named Anne Kalso took a trip to Santos, Brazil, presumably in the service of bettering her chaturanga. To what extent her flexibility reached guru level is unknown, because history chose to record an unrelated accomplishment. So fascinated was Ms. Kelso by the perfect posture she perceived in Brazilian Indians that she returned to Copenhagen to develop a shoe she hoped would improve the carriage of most of Western Europe.

Together with a shoemaker from Portugal, Ms. Kalso spent the late 1950’s and most of the 60’s developing such a piece of footwear, testing model after model on hikes of up to 500 miles long. Her painstaking industry yielded one of the most easily mocked fashion objects in modern history: the Earth Shoe, with its distinctive sole that looked like a pie plate waiting for a crust made of spelt.

Actually it wasn’t Ms. Kalso who gave the shoe its Woodstock Nation name. She initially called it the Kalso Minus Heel Shoe. When two New Yorkers, Raymond and Eleanor Jacobs, discovered her shoe, with its heel lower than the toes while vacationing in Europe in 1969, they arranged to distribute it in the United States. They opened a Kalso Minus Heel store on East 17th Street in Manhattan on April 1st, 1970, the first Earth Day. Capitalizing on the moment, Ms. Jacobs renamed her inventory Earth Shoes.

The world was receptive. By 1974 there were 60 Earth Stores across the country.

Now, just at the moment that the provocative fashion magazine Flaunt has summoned a Haight-Ashbury typeface for its most recent cover, and fringed suede and prairie skirts bombarded the spring 2002 runways, the Earth Shoe has made a re-entry, thanks to a shoe manufacturer named Michael Menard who spent the last six years acquiring the rights to produce it.

“Comfort, retro, yoga - this brand touches on all those trends,” explained Charles Liberge, executive vice president of newly created Earth Footwear, Mr. Menard’s company. “The Volkswagen Bug was making a comeback, Levi’s were making a reintroduction, I could see the long-term viability of a brand called ‘Earth.’ ”

There should certainly be some immediate viability in a shoe whose price falls just under $100. So far, though, the Earth Shoe has not prompted the excavation impulse of irony-enthralled fashion editors to whom Birkenstocks seemed so compelling this summer. The shoe is doing well at J. Jill, a retail chain (and catalog) that caters to the 40-something, SUV-driving mother of three. “She remembers when it came around the first time,” Robert Schmidt, a J. Jill buyer, said. “We’ve had a good reaction.”