Like Icarus soaring towards the sun, the fashion world has long been fixated on achieving great heights. From stilettos and platforms to boots bearing heels like church spires, vertically daring footwear has captivated designers and style icons alike through the decades. This gravitation towards the towering persists as new generations continue to push boundaries ever skyward.
“A woman’s foot has always been erotic and shoes highlight that,” says legendary cobbler Christian Louboutin, whose iconically red-lacquered soles have supported many an elegant elevation. Consider the Armadillo boots unveiled in Alexander McQueen’s seminal 2010 collection, Plato’s Atlantis. With curves echoing the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau and heels rising a vertigo-inducing twelve inches, their striking silhouette resonated through pop culture and Lady Gaga’s Monster era. Only two dozen exist; such limited availability only amplifies their mythic appeal.
Of course, McQueen’s armadillos merely graze the stratospheric limits of what’s possible. In 2004, designer James Syiemiong set a Guinness World Record with an ankle boot whose 20-inch height surpasses many ballet dancers en pointe. Famed footwear fetish label Pleaser Shoes has also reached rarefied air with multi-buckled, mega-platformed styles scaling as high as ten inches.
Recently this vertical preoccupation has manifested in renewed fixation over Marc Jacobs’ brooding Kiki boots. Initially worn by Kendall Jenner and Lady Gaga in Jacobs’ Fall 2016 Gothic-glam runway show, their posterior platform and stovepipe shaft strike a sharp silhouette favored by the style avant-garde. Bella Hadid, Olivia Rodrigo, and campaign star Kim Kardashian have all been spotted in variants of the kicky style.
Of course, chasing vertiginous lifts courts controversy as well as acclaim. High heels force the body into precarious postures that can injure if worn too long. Historically, elevated footwear signaled privilege amongst leisure classes unburdened by hard labor. Today some view skyscraper shoes as symbols of female objectification, whereas others see their choice to wear them as representing liberation and control over their self-presentation.
Ultimately the allure of heels that lift wearers far beyond flat-footedness shows no signs of subsiding. Our attraction seems primal, echoed even in their original conception – 16th-century Persian horse riders wore rudimentary elevated footwear to steady themselves in stirrups. That stabilizing innovation has evolved into an unstable passion bordering on obsession. But perhaps longing to rise above the mundane is an irrationally human desire we perennially pursue, despite the risk of crashing back to firm earth. Like Icarus, we build our wings and take flight, giddily airborne if only for a fleeting moment with the sun against our faces. The fashionable will likely continue testing the limits of how high our heels can take us, chasing that dizzying elevation.
