According to Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet, by Robert Greskovic, the roots of ballet go back to Renaissance Italy. In article "To the Pointe" notes that the origins are traced back only so far as 17th-century France. It is commonly accepted that Catherine deMedici may have brought ballet from Italy to France. Regardless, it is certainly true that ballet shoes as we know them today were not developed until much later. The early ballets were primarily danced by men, and the first shoes had high heels with buckles, modeled after those worn by King Louis XIV of France.
In the early ballets, the way to tell a man from a woman was whether or not their legs were showing underneath their costumes. However, this was about to change. In the mid-1700s, a dancer named Marie Camargo was the first to shorten her skirts and remove her high heels, in order to better demonstrate her technique. With this shift in focus from courtly pastime to developed technical art, we see the beginnings of the ballet shoe. At this point, dancers began to wear soft, simple slippers that allowed them to move more freely than before.
Marie Taglioni was the first recorded dancer to dance en pointe (that is, on 'tippy toes'), in 1832. Her shoes were darned on the sides, but the tip was open, as if she were without any shoes at all. There are also pictures which date back to 1804 of dancers on pointe, so it is likely that Taglioni was not the first. This development in ballet technique strengthened and solidified dancers throughout Europe.
After the French Revolution, ballet was no longer simply a courtly extravagance. It had developed into a technical art, and the footwear and costumes developed as well. Many shoemakers who are well-known to this day had their beginnings at this time (around 1823-1900). Jannssen, Eberman, Freed and Capezio are some of the ballet shoe makers that were established.
Ballet slippers are now practically weightless, and when wearing a well-made ballet slipper, a dancer may feel as if barefoot. The materials used to make ballet slippers are much more varied, ranging from canvas to leather to satin, and many have "split soles" in order to highlight the pointing of the dancer's toes. Pointe shoes now have blocks at the end to offer more support to the toes, which makes them significantly heavier. According to "Brief History," Emma Livry's shoes weighed only 34 grams each (around the year 1850), whereas 20th-century ballerina Anna Pavlova's shoes weighed 74 grams.