Why I Love Shoes

by Jen Nessel

The highs and lows of heels.

News flash: A recent recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board lets us keep our shoes on when using the inflatable slide during an emergency airplane landing. Implicit in the announcement is the recognition that women no longer wear heels to board a plane, not to mention other everyday activities. Could the days of high heels really be over? I bought my first pair only four years ago, a pair of shiny black ankle boots from Sam & Libby. I was exultant. Their two and-a-half-inch rubber heels were easy to walk in. I felt stylish. I could sweep into a room. I could kiss my six-foot-three-inch boyfriend without hurting my neck. Then I bought a pair of three-and-a-half-inch pumps for a black-tie dinner and ended up kicking them off under the table. Whenever I’ve worn them, I’ve had to take a cab home. I guess I still need to teach my dogs to heel. It’s amazing what we’ve put ourselves through. In seventeenth-century Europe, women wore five-inch heels and had to walk with canes so they wouldn’t topple forward. Turn-of-the-century Viennese made shoes whose heels were longer than their bases (you couldn’t walk in them). Finally, the 1950s brought us the lethal stiletto.

When you talk about heels, you are talking about sexuality: They push and pull your body to make your breasts and derriere thrust out in invitation. Performance artist Annie Sprinkle made a photograph of herself all dressed up called “Anatomy of a Pinup Photo” and scribbled on it the words: “These heels are excruciatingly high. I can’t walk and can barely hobble. My feet are killing me.” But then she added, “In spite of it all, I’m sexually excited and feeling great.”

But at what cost? My grandmother couldn’t wear flats for the first five years after she retired because she’d worn heels to work every day for 40 years and her tendons had shrunk. Heels can cause fallen arches, hammertoes and back pain — and can ruin your chances of running a marathon. Let’s talk about that ad where one team of women wearing red pumps plays basketball against another team wearing black pumps: You wanna bet on who’d win if one team suddenly put on Air Swoopes?

It’s true that heels make your calves look shapelier, but Reuben Confer, a trainer at New York City’s David Barton Gym, says you can achieve the same effect with an exercise called a calf raise: Just hold on to something like a doorknob for balance and raise yourself slowly (10 seconds) onto the ball of one foot, putting all your weight on your big toe, while you cross your other foot out of the way behind you; lower down (five seconds) and repeat 12 times, then change sides.

The one thing exercise can’t ever do for you, though, is make you taller. For me, the irresistible thing about heels is the sense of power that added height confers. However, I’m not about to walk with a cane to get it!

Editors’ note: Check out Rockport’s Web site for information on shoe care as well as their orthopedic referral service for physicians in your area (http://www.rockport.com).

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A History of Heels

• 1580 – Heels first added to men’s and women’s shoes in Europe.
• 1710 – Louis XIV decrees that red heels may be worn only by aristocrats.
• 1791 – High heels disappear with the French Revolution, because everyone has sudden??y been created equal.
• 1851 – Heels for women return on shoes shown at the Great Exhibition in London, the first world’s fair, which attracted more than 6 million atendees.
• 1885 – Parisian boot maker Francois Pinet introduces his signature hourglass heel.
• 1925 – High heels become the preferred shoe for women as hemlines shrink and the foot becomes more visible.
• 1936 – Pointy heel is replaced by the wedge, invented by Salvatore Ferragamo.
• 1953 – The high point of high heels arrives with the introduction of the stiletto.

Source: Jonathan Walford, curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto