History of High Heels. Where did they come from???

High-heeled footwear popularly called as heels or stiletto. When worn they raise the height of the person to some degree and complement well with most of the ensemble. High- heels give an aesthetic illusion of longer and toned legs. These heels come in a variety of style and shape.

High heels are somewhere between 2-3.5 inches. They have been an exclusive domain of women and girls in the form of boots, wedges, pumps, stilettos or high platforms. The high- heels trace its roots to horse- riders in the East who used them  for the purpose of functionality as they help hold a riders foot in the stirrups. These high- heels helped rid the problem of the foot slipping in the stirrup while riding. The usability is evident today even in the cowboy boots meant for the purpose.

The high- heeled shoes were successively caught onto by the fashion- conscious men and women in the French circuits and gradually seeped into the elite class. The wearing of heels became synonymous with the upper class and a way to show off their opulence between the 17th and the 18th century.  Though the heels have been in and out of fashion they never lost ground of their popularity and kept coming back with times.

Interestingly, it used to be men who wore the heels. For centuries, horseback riders in the East used them to provide balance when standing up in the stirrups (just like today’s cowboy boots). The style eventually moved to Western Europe, where aristocrats embraced the footwear — not for its practicality, but to set themselves apart from the lower-class workers. A painting from 1701, for example, shows Louis XIV of France posing rather regally in a pair of red-heeled shoes. According to W magazine, when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804, he decided to wear flats. The result: “The tiny general’s gesture marked the end of an era, not only of monarchist rule in France but also of high-heel male power-dressing throughout the Western world.”

So when and why did women start donning the accessory? Elizabeth Semmelhack, author of Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe and senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, believes the answer lies in mid-19th-century pornography, which used the recent invention of photography to disseminate images of naked women in heels. While this convergence of events infused the shoe with its erotic aura and modern feminine identity, these women didn’t have to stand in a pair of stilettos for very long or move around that much.