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Stilettos are ‘foot prisons’. Let’s bring the patriarchy to heel
Like women in heels, do you? Why don’t you try squeezing your size 10s into a vertiginous piece of plastic and wobble on them for hours after five glasses of champagne, writes Victoria Richards
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Your support makes all the difference.I once heard a guy describe shoes as “foot prisons”. He was part of the “barefoot” movement, people who choose to stomp around without shoes or boots or wellies or wedges or heels. Talking to him, I got the impression that to certain nomadic sorts, being tied to a life of leather and laces is to lose one’s sole [sic]. (Sidenote: he also described drinking Coke as “poison”).
Fans of this rather renegade movement refer to it as “grounding” or “earthing” – touching the earth with bare skin. One study, published in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health, found that “earthing” helped to improve sleep and reduce pain, due to the “transfer of electrons from the earth to the human body”.
It may sound wild and extreme, but if you’ve ever worn three-inch heels to a wedding for 12 hours, chances are that you too became a born-again member of the barefoot movement at about the time the DJ started playing “Come On Eileen”. The “transfer of electrons” from the earth is helped vastly by seven shots of tequila, trust me.
That’s why it’s so gratifying to see the likes of Jennifer Lawrence – J Law! Actual Katniss Everdeen! – refusing to abide by the unspoken “No Crocs at Cannes” rule and tripping down the red carpet in a red Christian Dior gown and flip flops, so that she could actually be comfy, for once. What a woman! What a maverick!
I salute J Law and those like her: Cate Blanchett, who shed her stilettos as she took to the stage at a party hosted by Variety magazine and the Golden Globes as a symbol of solidarity with women in Iran; Kristen Stewart, who ditched her Louboutins in protest at the dress code at Cannes in 2018, saying “things have to change immediately”; Julia Roberts, who took hers off and walked up the steps barefoot.
In 2015, despite not explicitly mandating heels for the red carpet, only “black tie/evening dress”, the festival faced a huge backlash after it was revealed that a group of women had been turned away from a screening of the film Carol for wearing flats – a move that was criticised by the actor Emily Blunt for undermining “equality”. “Everyone should wear flats, to be honest,” Blunt said. “We shouldn’t wear high heels. That’s very disappointing, just when you think there are these new waves of equality.”
And Natalie Portman recently laid into the ways in which women are expected to carry themselves at Cannes, contrary to their male counterparts: “How we’re supposed to look, how we’re supposed to carry ourselves, the expectations are different for you all the time,” she said. “It affects how you behave, whether you are buying into or rejecting it. You’re defined by the social structures upon you.”
The list of women rejecting rigid dress codes at glitzy formal events is nothing new: in 2014, actress Emma Thompson famously carried her heels on stage at the Golden Globes while also holding a martini glass, and revealed the truth about why all women carry plasters in their purses on a night out: “I just want you to know, this red, it’s my blood,” she said, referring to the red colouring of her Louboutin stilettos.
If you’ve ever squeezed your trotters into a pair of deceptively comfortable stilettos (comfortable, at least, in the shop), you’ll know the unique and exquisite pain after you’ve been standing up for.... ooh, approximately half an hour.
It’s then that it begins: the slow burn on the balls of your feet, the tight compression of your little toes trying to shuffle over to where the big toes are meant to be. As for toes, well, you don’t know anything about them anyway, because they’re completely numb. Eventually you start shuffling in an awkward hunch every time you have to go to the loo, or pose for a photo, looking more like a troll than a triumph. Heels are the worst. Ban them.
Who amongst us hasn’t kicked off their shoes beneath a table at a wedding or a posh dinner, only to realise the fatal flaw: once they’re off, they ain’t never going back on. Suddenly your feet have a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card, they’re hot and swollen and six sizes bigger than they were when you tried those dainty kittens on in the shop, when you “oohed” and “aahed” over the delicate stitching. “These are the ones,” you crooned to yourself. “They make me look like Tinkerbell.”
But now Tinkerbell can’t walk properly. Now, squeezing Tinkerbell’s feet back into her size 7s is as painful as childbirth.
Now, it is an inescapable fact that high heels look good, they are sexy, don’t get me wrong; they’re up there with pencil skirts and red lipstick and leather and zips and all the good things, and if women feel good in them and want to wear them for them, I’m all for it. But let’s not try and pretend they’re comfortable, ladies, please. We’re amongst friends, we can tell the truth.
But it’s no coincidence that heels have become a bastion of the beauty ideal; that in the 50 Shades of Grey world of confected heteronormative attraction, men wear suits and women wear heels. The patriarchy has a thousand blisters to atone for.
Like women in heels, do you? Why don’t you try squeezing your size 10s into a vertiginous piece of plastic and wobble on them for hours after five glasses of champagne?
Foot prisons. I’m breaking free. Now I just need to find my file.