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1 day ago
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I mean, it sounds mad now. I know this even as I write, it sounds impossible, like a weird lie you tell kids to show them how good they have it, but listen: in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I worked in a fancy underwear shop, I had to wear heels that were at least 3in high every day, no sitting down allowed. And then, and then, in my leisure time, instead of easing myself into, say, a bath of Uggs, I also wore a heel. “Eva,” I hear you say, “Did somebody hurt you? I hope you have someone to talk to.” But – it was normal. It was normal! I wore a spike-heeled boot, a massive platform, or sometimes for comfort, as a treat, a 1940s mule.
It was about fashion, yes, but it was also about growing up, and about authority, and about swagger. Also, I lived at the top of a very steep hill and the angle of a heel was sometimes helpful when walking home. Heels have never been about just one thing. Their meaning, pain and politics, move and merge.
When I started working in offices what women would do was wear tights and trainers on their commute, then slip into a heeled court shoe (often nude, often patent) on the pavement outside, so shameful was it to be seen in flats, so unprofessional. Under our desks would hide a menagerie of shoes, stacked among the computer cables to be worn in case of emergency – years later, leaving that desk, I pulled them out, these objects that once held so much power and, after weighing them in my hands for a good second, dropped them in the bin.
The pandemic almost killed the heel for good – sales of high heels dropped by 65% during the second quarter of 2020, when women, as one, removed their bras, ditched stiff denim, unfurled their toes as if monstera leaves. When life restarted, heels stayed off – on the front row of fashion shows, editors wore a clean white sneaker. “Athleisure” was inescapable. A line was drawn in the sand when Sarah Jessica Parker, she of running through Manhattan in her Manolos and talking to stilettos as if pugs, shut down her shoe line last year. But then, a stumble.
The politics of heels span gender, wealth, identity and power. They reappear in the culture like migraines at moments of political unrest. And so it is that, as the year unfolds, we are seeing heels rise again. “Bring Back the High Heel” begged a Gen Z writer on Slate, and fashion obliged. In the US, “Republican style” (huge blowdries, white teeth and patent stilettos) is enhanced by what they’re calling “Maga makeup” (“matte and flat”). On TikTok the “Loub job” has gone viral – this is Botox injected into the balls of the feet to allow women to wear heels all day. The “mob wife” aesthetic (a swing away from the “clean girl”, with her sneakers or clogs) prepared us for what trend forecaster Sean Monahan has labelled “Boom Boom”, which is brash, moneyed glamour – there were thigh-high boots at Armani, and at Versace, heels in the shape of a perfume bottle and champagne coupe stem.
All of which insists we ask: what does the heel mean today? Why, when we have seen comfort, when we have run for buses and calmed our bunions, why when we have adjusted the culture sufficiently to allow (below the ankle anyway) a certain level of gender equality, are we blithely going backwards? An unbidden image now of us as Cinderella’s ugly sisters, forcing our misshapen hooves into her size-three stiletto and insisting it fits, wobbling back to work in goddamn glass shoes, the decades ahead spent in a complex coercive marriage with a confused prince who was sure we didn’t smell like this that first time we danced.
What’s going on? While the Maga gals are surely embracing the heel as a marker of retrogressive femininity, those of us that lean lefter, perhaps, are wearing heels in a performance of protest. In their explainer of Boom Boom last week, the Guardian quoted Stella McCartney, backstage after showing her new “laptop to lapdance” collection (patent boots, bright red heels), talking about the end of the world. “Instead of going: I’m anxious and I’m scared of all the feelings which we’re attached to, I’m like: fuck fear. I’m flipping it.” And doing so by dressing like she’s going to battle – a fantasy costume that speaks to the anxiety and disconnect right now between the world we want and the world we have.
Today, I am wearing a heel for the first time in months. I’m wearing a whole little look, in fact, sitting at my desk after stomping to drop off my kids at school in a Miu Miu platform sandal and lip gloss, and picking my way slowly back home. I’d forgotten the frustration that comes with moving in heels, the sense you’re walking underwater, carrying the effort of getting where you need to go as if a tantrumming child. And the horrible awareness of the pavement, the knowledge that, as time has passed, what might have been a trip last time you wore heels could now be “a fall’. But now, seated, I can savour the benefits of remaining in slight discomfort – it’s a constant reminder that I have a body. A reminder, too, to sit up, to think about how to get to where I’m going, to pay attention.
