Guadalupana wrote:

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Women still brought to heel by stilettos

July 25, 2008

Comments on this story (2)

Antonia Zerbisias

Lately, killer heels have been on my mind, if not my feet.

This is not just because Miss USA 2008 took a tumble in last week's Miss Universe Pageant, following in the toppled tracks of Miss USA 2007.

Or because Victoria Beckham recently stepped out in five-inch Louboutin Lolas that bound her feet, as if in the old Chinese way.

It's also not because the current mania for fetishy-strappy-wrappy sandals.

It's not even because of Sex and the City's Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) negotiating the snow in spiked-heel boots. After all, there's something to be said for Kenneth Cole ice picks when the going gets treacherous.

It's just that, lately, everywhere in actual real life, heels are hitting unscaled heights, and are set to top a staggering six inches in the fall.

But already, from shop floors to dance floors, boardrooms to bedrooms, young women are destroying their tootsies on four-inch numbers, risking permanent ankle injury (cf. moi, red patent platforms, c. 1971) and guaranteeing themselves bunions, hammer toes and gnarly feet in the future (cf. moi, Birkenstocks, c. 2021.)

How? Do? They? Walk?

Last week on Montreal's très chic Rue Sherbrooke, women were even taking out their dogs with their dogs in stilettos. Every store window there was filled with stunning but crippling shoes, not a fallback ballet flat on display. (Those shlumpy things might be the only halfway sensible thing about Amy Winehouse.)

It's not just Montreal.

Toronto fashionistas can, and do, up the heel ante and still manage to party their way through the film fest.

Two Sundays ago at a wedding here, every woman under 30 was shod in to-fall-down-and-die-for shoes. Shoes so hot they put the hoo-ah! in the hora. When their wearers danced that traditional Jewish dance, they didn't just kick those heels, they kicked ass.

To squeeze into these pointy, open-toed skyscrapers, many women are undergoing painful surgery, removing bunions and am****ting toes.

As the Star's Rita Zekas says, it's da agony of da feet.

No thanks.

But then, I grew up with a mother who made my sisters and me wear hideous, round-toed, lace-up Oxfords to school because, as a teen in the Depression who waited tables and walked for miles, she wrecked her feet in cheap, ill-fitting shoes. She swore we would thank her someday.

(Thanks Mom!)

So now I still can wear ridiculously high-heeled shoes, although many of the more dangerous pairs have found their way to my nieces and friends' daughters, who claim, as I once did, that they are comfy.

Kid, talk to me after you've stood in those Dries Van Notens four hours straight on a humid summer night making small talk and retaining water.

All reasons that I howl at movies in which the female lead comes home from work or a party and strips drown to her undies but struts around in her pumps, even if the only one watching is the cat.

Uh-huh. Right. Sure.

It's only going to get worse, ladies.

Which is maybe why, last week, I was more dazzled by the shoes than the gowns at the not-to-be-missed Yves Saint Laurent show at Montreal's Musée des Beaux-Arts. These are brilliantly designed shoes, shoes that inspired all shoes since, sexy, timeless and not torturous.

A sandal from 1968 could easily be worn in 2008. Easily.

So why do women, who now run companies, wear shoes that they can't run in? Why, as women blaze new trails, do we handicap ourselves by mincing along like geisha girls?

We've come a long way baby, and now we can barely hobble to the ladies' room?

I can't resist wearing stupid shoes.

But I don't get it.

I only know that it's sole-destroying.

Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar.ca. She blogs at thestar.blogs.com.

Toronto Star

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*barfs*

everyone i know that has worn stilettos now has feet problems but i like them

Motown Junkie wrote:

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I'm only 5'2".  I don't do flats. 

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women who wear those flat ugly ballerina shoes look like they are 12 years old