Heels may be ruining Kate’s feet but it’s still her right to shoes
The only omission in the duchess’s beauty diary is an ace foot man: more use than all those footmen
Anne McElvoy
THE Duchess of Cambridge’s feet, as she treads shoeless among the Indian temples, are a matter of debate. “The fourth and fifth toes deviate towards the centre of the foot,” sniffs a busybody podiatrist. Kate has “relatively low arches” and her gait is “pronating”. A chorus of do- gooders recommend sensible shoes with flexible soles to halt damage to the royal metatarsals.
The critics are right, as they always are about other people’s weaknesses. Kate might comfort herself that Sam Cam’s feet are in a worse state, since she is obliged to wear even more punishing shoes on walkabouts. Theoretically, the duchess should be in orthopaedic lace-ups with the clodhopping one-inch heels we all tried to ditch as soon as we got to secondary school. What is she thinking teetering round in the heat in vertiginous Rupert Sanders on heels in impracticable blush pink?
She is, of course, thinking the same as the majority of other women who do not aspire to work in a nunnery or a health food shop: “I do not care if I am pronating, gathering corns or my nether digits are deviating. I like pretty, spindly shoes, they make me look better — and women from Newham to New Delhi love looking at them.”
So there we have it: Kate has joined the four-inch club of teetering greatness. I have, as it happens ventured forth myself in a pair of spindly “Ruperts” to an event which I thought would feature chairs, and ended standing on grass in a marquee for four hours, trying not to list sideways into fellow guests.
“High heels are painful pleasure,” decreed Christian Dior. But they are also transformative. They give stature to the small and allow the mediumsized among us to assume a catwalk loftiness. They remove associations of the dowdy governess from a mid-calflength dress. And (gentlemen, you may have noticed this), they turn a unisex stride into a bouncy progress: “Jell-O on legs,” as Jack Lemmon observes in Some Like it Hot.
When life is fraught, we“fourinch ers”hav eat least our haughty stride to keep our shattered confidence intact. The transition from office drudge to evening diva is perfected when we slip into them. We can tower over kitten-heel wearers, those cautious female politicians’ shoes that are neither honest flats nor proper heels.
The only omission in the duchess’s beauty diary is an ace foot man: more use than all those footmen. Happily, I know one who dispenses restitution a mere stiletto’s throw from the palace. Bastien Gonzalez is the international prince of the pedicure. I have bumped into him in the Gulf, removing the corns of oil magnates, in New York ten ding to A- lister sand in Paris, gathering gossip among the Louboutin-wearers of the Left Bank. But he also occasionally dwells behind Peter Jones, righting the effects of heels on us civilians.
Happily, he never lectures sufferers on their shoe habits, just gets rid of the damage with the precision of a surgeon and dispenses some exercises to do while watching Joan’s elevated sashay in Mad Men. This is all Kate needs to keep the moral high ground. The example of Ginger Rogers will come in handy: she famously did everything Fred Astaire did — just backwards and in high heels.