I never wear high heels.
As a child, I remember playing dress up in silver stiletto sandals that used to belong to my mother during her 1980s disco dancing days. I would mince delicately around the house in the shoes, imagining all the adult-like activities I’d perform in shoes just like these. Somehow, this glamorous future never materialized.
While I admire the powerful click-clacking of a sturdy pair of pumps and appreciate the way a heel instantly energizes any outfit, I simply cannot bear to wear them. After 10-15 minutes, I find the pain becomes unbearable and I simply must change. The concept of ‘comfortable high heels’ is a myth. I own literally one pair of heels that I wear to every single fancy event—a pair of black mary-jane Tabis. They do not even begin to match most of my dresses, but look weird enough that I figure people assume the look is intentional.
Despite my powerful personal distaste for the style, I am increasingly moved to make a bold statement: high heels are so back. I recently ventured outside of my familiar neck of the woods into the certifiably ‘cool’ part of town1, and noticed not one, but TWO young women wearing intimidatingly high heels. Not a chunky Cuban heel, not a kitten heel, but honest-to-goodness dagger-style stilettos. One looked very similar to, albeit slightly higher than, this pair of Maguire slingback heels. The other was a pair of vintage black slip-on pumps with a lucite spike heel. I know the saying goes that three makes a trend and I only have two examples here, but these women looked so cool and the heels were so high that I remain convinced.
When I was in high school, I was perusing through the bargain bin of a bookstore and found something formative: a photo book called We’re Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, SF/LA 78-80. It was very clearly an antecedent to the indie sleaze party photography of Misshapes/the Cobrasnake that was popular at the time. Coming across this book was a bit like listening to the Clash for the first time, in the sense that I was forced to contend with the gulf between what my perception of punk was and what I was actually hearing (in this case, seeing). The outfits worn by these people I no doubt would have wanted to be friends with had I been born 30 years earlier were both surprising and strange. Everyone is mixing thrift store castoffs in a way I imagine would have seemed incredibly perverse to adults at the time but appears quaint now. The aspect of the book I found most baffling wasn’t the prevalence of 1930s tea dresses or 1950s angora sweaters, but how many of my fellow freaks were wearing bitchy, dangerous-looking high heels.
Growing up in the 2000s, I perceived high heels to be the ultimate symbol of conformity. Why would a bunch of cool punk rock freaks, ostensibly slam-dancing on their feet all night, choose a style of footwear that imposes a literal handicap on the wearer? Who actually dresses like this?
Now I have my answer. On the two young women I spotted in west end Toronto, their scary, giant-ass heels read as oppositional and defiant, not hobbling emblems of the patriarchy. They were even, I’d venture to say, punk rock.
We’re now almost 30 years past the spike-heeled heyday of the late ‘90s/early 2000s, when Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos were the only footwear of choice for a self-respecting fashion plate. Since then, high heels have engorged to a slightly more comfortable thickness (think Jeffrey Campbell Litas); then ceased to exist, while chunky dad sneakers ruled the roost the better part of a decade.
But with the emergence of Ozempic, not only are body silhouettes slimming down, our shoes are too. Slim-soled sneakers like the Adidas Tokyo and the Puma Speedcat are replacing the chunkier Fila Disruptors sneakers and literally any Hoka sneaker as the flat-shoe lover’s sneaker of choice. All of a sudden, a vertiginous stiletto feels much more appealing than its more stable, bulbous counterpart. No longer a tool of supplicating the patriarchy, a truly high heel is now subversive, not straight-laced. I may not be participating, but I expect very very high heels will be making their comeback very very soon.
I was dropping off ceramic trinkets to sell at one of my favourite stores, Baa Baazaar on Roncesvalles.