High On Heels

No ordinary flats can produce the seductive gait achieved by a pair of gravity-defying stilettos. Viseshika Sharma traces the history of our most-loved footwear.

- Viseshika Sharma

There’s this unusually innocent Khushwant Singh joke about a hopeful mother who responds to a matrimonial advertisement on her daughter’s behalf. On being told that her five-foot-tall angel falls below the minimum height requirement of five feet, four inches, the mom promptly enquires if she will be deemed acceptable by wearing four-inch heels! When they aren’t being used to bridge an alliance of mismatched heights, heels induce nostalgia and communicate both femininity and power. Every woman remembers playing dress-up in her mother’s stilettos, the excitement of buying her first pair — and then the first undignified fall! Christian Louboutin, Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik are regularly name checked by women of style, with a passion that has never extended to that sensible driving loafer. When Nancy Sinatra sings These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, nobody imagines clunky military boots.

High heels aren’t a modern invention — butchers in ancient Egypt were reported to sport shoes that elevated them above the rather messy hazards of their occupation. Venetians and Spaniards wore chopines — platform overshoes that kept their hems and regular footwear clear of the muck of the streets. The higher the chopines, the greater the wearer’s standing in society, making the platforms the original limo-to-club footwear as venetian nobility became dependent on servants to prop them up as they walked. However, since they are counted as being high only when the wearer’s heels are significantly elevated over their toes, chopines and modern-day flatforms don’t quite make the cut.