When I read the story about Lady Gaga tripping and falling down at Heathrow Airport in London wearing her impossibly high black platform boots, I thought, “Well, it had to happen eventually.” Given the danger in wearing shoes like that (and in an airport no less), I wondered how she actually escaped unscathed.
Then, when I was recently in New York shopping at Saks I saw a sea of these excessive skyscraper shoes ranging in price from $300 to $2,000. Not only do you have to destroy your feet to be fashionable you have to pay through the nose for the privilege!
I have always had strong feelings about women who choose to wear towering, stilt-like shoes. Aside from the fact that these styles of shoes cause women to tear ligaments in their calves and knees, hurt their backs, and cause deformed feet, there is just the ridiculous impracticality of it all.
I watch women barely being able to walk in these monolithic, 8-inch soaring things that loosely resemble shoes. Stumbling and teetering as they walk after just a few steps I feel like offering them a chair and saying, “Sit down already, you look great, you are beautifully fashionable without the artifice, now take them off and get real!”
Of course, you would never catch a man doing anything so awkward and just plain uncomfortable as wearing shoes that made walking an acrobatic act of desperation just for the sake of fashion. And we wonder why women sometimes don’t get a leg up in their career compared to men!
I know: There are women who insist they love wearing these shoes, and if anything, their feet hurt when they don’t wear them. The reason the shoes may not hurt anymore (we know they hurt like hell in the beginning) is because just like the act of Chinese foot binding, the body and feet adapt to this mangled, distorted way of walking.
By the way, foot binding was the fashion trend in China for hundreds of years. It was an important ritual for Chinese women to bind the feet of baby girls in such a way as to break their bones and reshape the foot. Feet remained bound in this manner for life so they would eternally look small and curved.
Interestingly, Chinese women also wore a version of current platform shoes worn today. Can anyone hear the echoes of pain all of those Chinese women endured? It is a past that should have been left in the past and not transported to modern times on the streets of New York and other cities and towns around the world.
Okay, I’m done ranting. I’m going to put my flats on and go to work knowing I can walk down the stairs and not fall, or at least be ready to run from the fallout this blog may cause! So what do you think, ladies? Are the type of shoes Lady Gaga and many other women wear worth the effort, expense, and possible bodily harm? Does fashion have to be painful?
