For the Love of High Heels

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Recommended: Mass media and women's body image

For the Love of High Heels

As I watch a fellow student teeter down the stairs in the campus center, her normally flamboyant bounce is no where to be seen as she tensely grips the guardrail. She lowers herself delicately down, each step carefully calculated. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot- and she makes it to the bottom without mishap. The culprits encumbering her normally wild grace are easily discerned; her shoes. Her feet are wrapped up in four inch- plus a one inch platform to make for a total of five inches- fire engine red heels. They're strappy sandals that lace half way up her calves with a silk ribbon and have effectively made walking an ordeal. Why do we do this? Well darling, because "Shoes are hot!" (Benstock & Ferriss p1)

That's right, shoes are hot, and the hottest ones of all are high heels. They're collected, worn, and loved by women across the globe. They're everywhere. They run rampant in books, calendars, photographs, album and movie covers, dangling in miniature precious metal versions from earlobes and chains, and let's not forget the most important place- women's closets.

Shoes are no longer something one simply wears on their feet, but a passion, a hobby, one's personal statement, a source of authority, sexual independence and joy. They're a constant obsession in pop culture, endlessly talked about and fetishized in television, movies, song lyrics, and seem to be worn without fail by glamorous celebrities no matter the occasion. The most notorious of the shoe loving pop culture media is of the smash HBO series Sex in the City, in which shoes are one it's main themes.

Physically high heel shoes, and specifically the stiletto, are the source of much debate. More and more studies...

... middle of paper ...

...and Benstock write that there is "...satisfaction we take in having purchased a pair of shoes that 'is us,' that represents us... The fashionable dress of the Western world is one means whereby an always fragmentary self is glued together into a semblance of unified identity. Shoes serve as markers of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and even sexuality." (p4)

The idea of piecing ourselves together with our things can be applied to any accessory or article of clothing, but I argue that shoes are more than that. Power, sexuality and sheer aesthetic pleasure contribute to a love of shoes. Janet Lyon reflects upon the mystery of the love of shoes writing, "How is one to account for this hypnotic allure, for so many generations of modernity's women, of the impractical, foot-deforming, outrageous shoe?....For fabulous shoes are indeed a joy." (Benstock & Ferriss p273)

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