Titled “Whaa? Positively Puzzling Celebrity Shoes,” the Daily News recently featured a collection of the newest shoes celebrities are putting on their feet these days. Thanks to these red carpet style setters, we’ll soon be seeing everyday fashionistas wobbling in the streets in super high stilettos and holding on to lamp posts trying to balance themselves on stilt-like platforms, while their spiked and studded shoe straps mash passing ankles.
It appears a number of these footwear creations are not made for hitting the pavement. Gwyneth Paltrow needed her bodyguard’s help to clomp down a flight of stairs in her towering pencil thin stilettos.
And just when did shoe straps suddenly multiply into five, ten or twenty straps on a single shoe? The only function this overload performs as far as I can tell is to bite into more flesh, cut off more circulation and leave behind longer stairways of red welts.
Dooce, a well-known blogger, recently wore a pair of these thick platformed, multi-strap styled, high risers (her “hooker shoes” she dubbed them) to a White House conference. Stumbling and wobbling in pain with every step, she barely managed to totter there from her hotel only a few blocks away. Afterward she boasted of being almost as proud of enduring that excruciating pain as when she gave birth without an epidural.
Not all women are ready to suck up this level of pain in worship of the shoe gods. Some time ago I read an interview with Isabella Rossellini who in the name of comfort was shod in a pair of blissfully roomy men’s shoes designed to actually accommodate five flesh and blood rounded toes. I’ve always been puzzled why men’s shoes were shaped like a man’s foot and women’s shoes were shaped to accommodate a woman’s foot with maybe a third of it chopped off.
My own willingness to tolerate foot pain ended years ago in art school when I thought modeling for a fashion illustration class would be an easy way to pick up some cash. Having only one pair of shoes with me for that modeling gig, moderately comfortable high heels, I thought I could handle the discomfort for the three-hour class. And things went okay for the first five and ten minute poses. But then it was time for 25-minute poses. As I stood motionless, every muscle, tendon and bone locked into position for 25-minute eternities, my feet were assaulted by a non-stop kamikaze knife attack. That night I limped home desperately longing for a fairy godmother to transform my heels into floppy sneakers. Since then I’ve purchased shoes for comfort first, looks second.
Women going the fashion slave route will not only accept the searing pain of wearing iron foot masks, but will even take it a step further and undergo cosmetic surgery to allow then to continue squeezing into the skyscraper heels that injured their feet in the first place. They will blithely have their toes re-straightened, lengthened and shortened (we’re talking breaking bones here). They’ll not flinch at having their damaged footpads injected with fat fillers and augmented with silicon pads. And to squeeze into narrower shoes, these high heel worshippers won’t stop for a second at having their whole foot narrowed (three guesses what surgeons do with those extra foot bones).
But as a cause for possible future foot damage — these new, ultra extreme shoe designs with super high stilettos, massive platforms and multiple, restraining straps appear to be in a class by themselves. If women don’t get a grip on their masochistic love affair with shoes, foot surgeons are in for a windfall.
More adventures on the Shopping Trail:
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