Need to run for the bus in your work shoes? Just wear adjustable heels, writes Rosita Boland
Like lifts, the fashion in heels is constantly going up and down. They've even gone round and round: Heelys, trainers with a detachable small wheel in the heel, were a hit craze with the children who persuaded someone to buy a pair for them, although the adult version never took off.
Definitely the silliest footwear trend of recent years was the flip-flop with the bizarre addition of heels: the double negative of shoe grammar. A flat plastic sandal meant to be worn at the beach, the heeled sandal was more clip-clop than flip-flop. An astonishing number of people actually bought them, although presumably not to wear on the sand.
But while there's certainly money to be made from children's shoes - their feet, after all, keep growing - and there are lines of discreet, expensive and ultimately inoffensive-looking shoes for men, the real money in footwear is in the women's market. To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged by the fashion industry, that a woman in possession of a few bob must be in want of another pair of shoes she doesn't actually need.
The fashion industry loves to think that every woman who has heard of über-expensive brands Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik will not rest until she buys at least one pair, and preferably several. That's what they really want you to buy, but lots and lots and lots of pairs of other less well-known brands will do instead: shoes to match every outfit, car-to-bar shoes, shoes you buy and never wear, shoes you buy and then can't walk in, shoes you hate once you take them out of the box at home but think you might bond with some day, shoes for daytime and shoes for night-time.
Now, the latest wheeze. Footwear that combines two of the above: shoes with retractable heels. CAMiLEON Heels, which have a heel with a hidden hinged piece of steel that can be adjusted from a height of 1.5 inches to 3.75 inches, have been on sale in the US for four months and are now available online. The idea, as co-inventor Lauren Handel says, is that: "For the first time, this offers women the possibility to combine fashion, comfort and convenience, all in one shoe".
At €221 a pair, these shoes are not cheap - so, gimmick or not, they'll cost you more than a pair of heeled beach flip-flops. They come in 23 styles, all of which look strangely similar on the website, www.zappos.com, and all of which also look obstinately unfashionable. The low-heeled version is a prim court shoe and the heeled version looks like a court shoe with notions. Also, to accommodate the yo-yo-ing between heights, the leather in the main body of the shoe has to have some give in it, which means it looks wrinkled, rather than sleek. And even on the website, you can clearly see the join, which renders the whole thing kind of pointless: where's the glamour in part-time high heels? What woman really wants a package of "fashion, comfort and convenience, all in one shoe"? It simply doesn't add up to something that looks sexy, no matter how you spin it.
More than any other item of clothing, when it comes to shoes, women will punish their body to get into high heels. As Handel points out, "We would want for women all over the world who want or need to wear high heels to have all the benefits available to them that an adjustable-height high heel offers." Despite what Handel says, no woman "needs" to wear high heels, but fashion makes them want to.
The only thing is, while their feet might suffer, at least wearing high heels isn't the life-threatening fashion statement that wearing a new dress proved to be for one woman in the 19th century. Australian writer Gail Bell, in her 2002 book, The Poison Principle, A Memoir about Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings recounts a story she found in an old copy of the British Medical Journal.
The year was 1862, the city London, and the fashion for women's formal wear was the crinoline. The wide skirts of the crinoline required up to 20 yards of fabric and, then as now, silk was expensive. Instead of silk, one young woman ordered the cheaper alternative of green tarlatane for the dress she was wearing to a London ball. The fabric came from a German factory: cotton overlaid with a paste of starch and copper arsenite. When dry, the fabric shone jewel-green, as bright as the silk she could not afford.
The young woman danced all night. By midnight she was feeling ill. By dawn she felt worse. By morning, she was dead, poisoned by her own dress. She had inhaled the deadly arsenic particles as they drifted up from the treated fabric, all 20 yards of it, as she swirled round the room like a dervish, doomed by her fashion choice.
At least the greatest danger posed by high heels is the risk that you might fall over and twist your ankle.