High heels have worked to my advantage
As MPs denounce office dress codes, Christa D’Souza says she couldn’t function without stilettos
Why do little girls like to dress up in their mummy’s heels? It may have nothing to do with slavishly submitting to the male gaze, I would wager, but rather some kind of inexplicable feeling I still get every time I put on a pair of stupidly high Lanvin stiletto ankle boots.
Back then, it was about the excitement of being a grown-up; now, it’s that they might make me feel more equal, more on a par – perhaps more powerful. There’s something assertive about the way they click on a floor.
Yet that sound could soon become extinct. A parliamentary report published last week, “High Heels and Workplace Dress Codes”, found that employers across the UK are enforcing mandatory heel heights. One woman, giving testimony, noted a 3in requirement in the nursery furniture department in which she worked. At that same luxury store, women working on its fashion and beauty counters would often be reprimanded for trying to sneak in flat shoes.
The report came in the wake of a year-long campaign by Nicola Thorp, a temp worker, who was sent home from a job for not wearing heeled shoes. Her petition to make it illegal for employers to impose gender-based dress codes received more than 150,000 signatures.
But it is, of course, all a question of choice. If anyone forced me to wear high heels five days a week for eight hours a day, I’d tell them to f--- off. Certainly, there are clinical reasons for not wearing them: a study of airline stewardesses last year found that even one hour of walking in heels can, in the long run, weaken the ankles. Others have noted shortened calves, osteoarthritis and altered posture from their prolonged use.
The report included examples of restaurants, department stores and financial institutions forcing women – via legal loopholes – to straighten their hair, wear skirts instead of trousers and stilettos, while on the job.
Honestly. Men. Because that is the problem here, isn’t it? If you look at the world of magazines and fashion journalism (an industry that is dominated by women) and what the powers-that-be are wearing in the front row, you’ll see it’s mostly flats. Fifty years from now, sooner maybe, I bet we will look at stilettos as being as much of a cultural anachronism as Chinese foot binding.
For the moment, though, none of that diminishes the pleasure I derive from what they do to my perfectly ordinary calves; the magic they impart to otherwise unflattering trousers, the confidence they effortlessly bestow. Explain to me, too, the habit I have, if I’m sitting at my laptop with writer’s block, of putting on the aforementioned Lanvin boots – a gift from several Christmases ago – and having a walk round
‘Nothing diminishes the pleasure I derive from what they do to my calves’
the house until inspiration descends. It might sound mad, but I’m not alone. The no-nonsense writer Cressida Connolly once told me that the only way she could get any work done was in red lipstick and a pair of high heels.
So are heels really the tool of male oppression we (I) so readily paint them to be? No. For me, they are intensely empowering in the same perverse way that a corset is. Not in a kinky way, but in an unequivocal, held-in, don’t-mess-with-me way.
Case in point was last weekend, when I wore sneakers to a lunch do. Wrong move. Because at 5ft 4in, I am smaller than almost everyone. I found myself both figuratively and literally having to jump up and down to be heard. And feeling self-conscious about my grey roots. I should have just done that ghastly Eighties thing and brought a pair of heels along in my bag. It’s just polite to wear them – there is something about flats, however fancy, that smacks of “I couldn’t be bothered”. The problem is, I cannot walk in high heels. A recurrent memory from my childhood is finally wearing my mum down for a pair of ridiculously high, pinkstudded clogs from Sacha, and insisting on wearing them throughout a family trip to Paris in the early Seventies. There I was, lagging behind on the Pont Neuf, my 11-yearold feet crippled in pain. God, did I love them. And, God, did they hurt. And then there are my Forties-style perforated court shoes from Prada, more than a decade old, in which I have never had a bad time. Ever. I really ought to have them copied, they’re that magical. But the idea of tackling a pair of stairs in them without a bannister or my other half ’s arm? Forget it. How people negotiate cobblestones has always baffled me. I suppose it involves lots of practice or, as one woman I know advises, walking around the house in new heels with thick chunky socks before wearing them outside. My hope is for someone like the starchitect and general all-round inventor Thomas Heatherwick to put his considerable might behind the problem. I’ve already mooted it to him and he didn’t say no, so I’m crossing my fingers. Wouldn’t a pair of heels that felt like a pair of Uggs do more for the world than a bridge with a garden on it, after all?