High Heels: Take Two

Can you walk in high heels? Marilyn Monroe certainly knew how to do it. Think of that scene in Niagara (1953; dir. Henry Hathaway), when as Rose Loomis, the frustrated wife of a jealous man, she strolls away from the camera, her shapely hips swaying side to side. Or what about Sarah Jessica Parker who,gianmarco lorenzi shoes as sprightly single gal Carrie Bradshaw in the HBO series Sex in the City (1998-2004), convinced her women viewers that they too could leap over puddles and trip down the streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan in towering Manolo Blahniksand sky-high Jimmy Choos?

But the logistics of moving in high heels are far more complicated. Parker is a trained ballerina who got to remove those shoes as soon as the director called cut. And Monroe aided the undulation of her signature walk by wearing a specially altered pair of shoes, with one heel shaved a fraction of an inch gianmarco-lorenzi diamond shoes lower than the other. Yet, season after season, we look to the runways for new innovations in shoe design that will lift our spirits as well as give us more height.

It is important to remember that the present incarnation of the high heel owes its secret to a weapon. Late in the sixteen century, a new type of dagger appeared in Italy. With a long thin blade and deadly sharpened tip, its resemblance to the stylus, a pointed writing instrument, gave rise to its popular name “Stiletto.” Easily concealed and perfectly designed for stabbing, it quickly became the weapon of choice for assassins. Some versions featured a blade with a small trough to hold poison, just in case the thrust missed its mark. The name of the first designer to gold embellished sandals reinforce a high heel with a thin steel shaft—hence the “stiletto heel”—has not been recorded, but as early as the 1930s, the term is used to describe a new heel design with lofty potential. The steel support embedded in the heel of the shoe functioned like a steel beam in a reinforced concrete skyscraper; the strong yet slender element encased in another material supported the stress of increased height without sacrificing streamlined proportions.