Head Over Heels

In women high heel shoes, as in life, there is often a fine line between appreciation and obsession. Look at Imelda R. Marcos or the fictional protagonist Carrie Bradshaw, who famously quipped about “a woman’s right to shoes.” From wedge to prism to stiletto, Valerie Steele and Colleen Hill of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology meticulously chronicle the world of fancy footwear in their new book, “Shoe Obsession” (Yale University Press, $45). The book, which accompanies an exhibit of the same name now on view at the museum, delves deep into the history of the high heel. Once the domain of both men and women, by the 1750s the heel had largely become the territory of the fairer sex. “Even many of the oldest surviving examples of footwear — some of which were worn more than 5,000 years ago — reveal an emphasis on design, as opposed to mere function,” Hill writes. Included in the book are 150 pairs, from 16th-century chopines to Roger Vivier’s Eyelash Heel pump. Steele and Hill also incorporate the wisdom of various experts, from the neurologist V.S. Ramachandran to The Times’s Suzy Menkes, all in an effort to answer the age-old question: Why do some women so love their womens heels? While Steele concedes that there is more than one answer, she says that “one of the most important reasons is because high-heeled shoes are today the prime sartorial symbol of femininity. Any definition of ‘femininity’ entails how sexual difference has been understood and represented,” she writes. “What is significant is what is made of that fact. Does it signify women’s inferiority, delicacy, desirability? And if some women have smaller feet than other women, what does it say about them? Are they more aristocratic, domestic, erotic? The disempowering aspect of high heels plays a role in some men’s sexual fantasies; ‘In high heels, women can’t run away.’ But another fantasy (common among both men and women) involves the sexual power allegedly provided by high heels.”