I quite like Agent Provocateur in general – while it’s a bit ridiculous in places (this may be many things, but it is not a ‘playsuit’), I do feel like it’s positively targeted at strong, empowered women who like luxury lingerie, and their partners (the Gentleman’s Guide for boyfriends on their website is quite amusing).

This may be because their creative director is herself a female force to be reckoned with: Sarah Shotton, who worked her way up the company from an ‘apprenticeship’ when it had just started up. Now at the top, Shotton states that she tries every design she looks at on a size 8 model and a size 16, to ensure that it works on a range of shapes. No more than she should do, perhaps, but probably still more than many other lingerie designers. So I’m on side from the get-go, really.

But to the ad!

H&M’s Winter 2012 campaign

First things first, this has got to be in the minority among lingerie campaigns in that the female protagonist is active and capable. She’s not in a boudoir and she’s not being sexy for an imagined (male) viewer. I present this from La Senza and this from the M&S ‘Autograph’ lingerie range for comparison.

For a more current spin, to my right is H&M’s Winter 2012 print campaign. Oh look, it’s another woman in lingerie on a bed (/ weird sheepskin shebang), lit so you can’t actually see her face. For a more avant garde take on these same ideas, check out this bizarre mini-film masterwork from Damaris. Damaris, I love you dearly, but seriously, what is this?

Conversely, in the Agent Provocateur advert our heroine is out and about, and about to get on a bus. She’s wearing a wrap dress and plimsoles – well-dressed, but clearly not on any kind of Special Sexy Trip – and she also just happens to be wearing matching Agent Provocateur lingerie.

One effect of this decision is to make the underwear look practical. This is not true of most of Agent Provocateur’s range (or price tag). They’ve always been really into the idea of lingerie as a ‘special secret’ (not Victoria’s).

The photography on their website is lit as if by searchlight to reinforce this, and this advert refines that a little, pushing lingerie as a secret just for you, the wearer. But, they’re arguing here, it’s also something viable for every day. Our protagonist is just hangin’ out in her designer lingerie, because she wants to wear it – for herself.

Personally, I commend her: good underwear is the skeleton of an outfit, and I don’t see why, if you’re lucky enough to be able to buy luxury lingerie, it should have to languish at the bottom of a drawer until some performative Special Occasion.

But I think this ad – and its slogan, ‘sexy never takes a day off’ – is also saying that there’s something almost intrinsic about ‘sexy’. In this advert, the Agent Provocateur underwear, and the choice to wear it out and about, is just an extension of the heroine’s natural confidence and, well, sexiness.

It’s this confidence that makes her actually embark on the chase in the first place. The underwear’s not making her sexy; she’s chosen the underwear because she already is sexy. Typical advertising, of course, but isn’t it better to see someone being sexy in their day to day life than backlit in a studio, lounging on a bed?

Amalgamating the shop worker, flight attendant and businessman, McDonald’s latest uniform incarnation is a far cry from Ronald McDonald’s red and yellow clown suit.

The working ‘uniform’ is ubiquitous to a huge number of professions, despite the possibility that many of us associate it first and foremost with the service industries. By service industries, I don’t mean simply McDonald’s workers, Tesco employees or the like; service means serving you (the consumer) through labour. Retail fashion workers are a prime example, where the ‘uniform’ may not be a classic sweatshirt-and-trousers combo, but rather items picked solely from the collection of garments that the shop provides – living mannequins, in a sense. But this is getting way ahead of myself; let’s go back a bit.

Wearing a uniform, as so many sixth form debates have pointed out, has both positive and negative effects on the individual and the group in any given institution. School uniform has the apparent benefit of making everyone equal (at least, visually) while at the same time ensuring creative idiosyncratic fashion choices are made in the smallest details; how many buttons are done up, how the tie is tied, what badges you wear and the jewellery you sneak in. Even in a photo that has been posed for this Guardian piece, the same uniform turns up in many different styles. So what about the uniform at work? I’ve worked in enough poorly-paid retail jobs to realise what the proposed function of a uniform is, and what actually happens when you wear it.

Just like at school, a uniform is meant to show that all the wearers are equal – visually. For the consumer, workers are identified by what they are wearing; many a time I have been asked in various shops where the changing rooms are, because my particular garb is close enough to the ‘uniform’ of a retail fashion worker to confuse the consumer (although mostly this happens in charity shops. I’m down with that). Workers are set apart from consumers and grouped together as labour through their uniform.

However, looking the same and being the same are (duh) different. My manager and I wear the same uniform: shirt, trousers, and name badge – but are we the same? No. She’s the manager; she’s my boss. Confusing messages of similarity (and potential solidarity?) and hidden hierarchies abound with the working uniform, especially in retail sectors where more than one hierarchy is on the ‘working floor’. You might be able to argue that those industries in which workers are physically grouped by hierarchy – like the factory floor, where the manager is not as physically ‘present’ as on the shop floor – are able to recognise the uniform’s messages of similarity and solidarity more effectively than those where workers of disparate hierarchies are bundled in together.

From Bobby Pin, these are 1950s beauty salon uniforms:

From a 1950s magazine, uniforms that couldn’t be any more ‘feminine’: accentuating waist, hips, drawing attention to face and hairstyle. For this author, they’re utterly beautiful. But then I am a total sucker for ‘the giant coachman collar’.

As well as hierarchy being hidden (but strangely elaborated too, I suppose, by its hiddenness), gender too, is at least under an attempted disguise through the wearing of uniforms. Gone are the days of Mad Men, where women wore skirts and men wore trousers – now we all have to wear trousers, and horrible polo shirts too. An apparently gender-neutral uniform is provided in a number of sectors (mine was previously white shirt and black trousers – or skirt) that never really successfully disguises gender to the consumer in the same way that it conceals hierarchy to some extent. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work, especially if the size is designed for someone who doesn’t have breasts.

And that, my friends, neatly brings me onto those workplaces where you don’t have a uniform. Or, at least, they don’t tell you that you have a uniform. Explicitly, the dress code might be not much more than ‘no shorts or clogs’, but implicitly, the dress code will be bending and morphing round the individuals who are adhering to and working against it. This dress code will tie in gender and authority hierarchies, as illustrated by the business suit and its female equivalent.

From my employment experience (and others who have agreed with me), men wear business suits, but women do not wear business suits, despite this (again) apparently gender-neutral ‘uniform’ being available. A number of women working in offices might wear the female equivalent of the business suit (Next surely embodies this look), which more often than not includes a) skirt b) something frilly c) front-cover-flawless makeup. So it’s the business suit, plus a) traditional emblem of femininity b) annoying and impractical emblem of femininity c) emblem of femininity that is often perceived to be caused by heavy external pressures to look good at all times. The visual ‘uniform’ of the business suit is not gender-neutral, because it is adapted to become gender-specific; whether this is due to individual taste or workplace culture, I’m unsure, but it does inform the hierarchy of the office.

I. Love. Her.

Rather than looking at personal comments regarding taste that may be made about office workwear, my interest instead lies in how this implicit dress code dramatically affects the hierarchical makeup of a working environment, potentially without many of the individuals involved even being fully aware of how it is being shaped around them. If I arrive tomorrow at work with a ‘male’ business suit on, will I be taken more seriously? Or, as a woman, if I arrive in a simulated version of that ‘male’ business suit, will I be declined respect because I appear too much like one of the boys? Am I feminine enough for the office if I don’t wear flawless makeup – or any makeup? If I start dressing like the big boys, will they still know it’s me on the inside? I believe there is a definite question of sexuality and sexual preference here that comes into play with ‘levels’ of femininity in the workplace, although I don’t feel able to tackle this in great detail here (or just yet).

Workplace hierarchies are constituted through a vast number of factors, but the role of dress and dress codes is one that can’t be ignored. From traditional environments where gender and authority hierarchies may have been distinguished and designated by an explicit uniform placed upon the workers, contemporary working environments – especially those in the creative industries – now have to juggle with an implicit dress code that is created and defined by the workers themselves (across all hierarchies) in their clothing choices. Plus, there is the added element of workers’ perception of the importance of that dress code or, conversely, the desire to play with it and break some boundaries, in designating what you can, or can’t, wear to work.

• EB Snare is a full time writer who also writes freelance, makes and sells her own jewellery, drinks, smokes and listens almost exclusively to 80s electropop music. She completed her Masters in 2011, with a dissertation on fashion blogging as a contemporary labour form that included some sweet diagrams. Her blog, The Magic Square Foundation, covers fashion, culture and general life, or you can talk to her on Twitter: @ebsnare. And, yeah, we’ve snapped her up for Team BadRep too. Woo!

‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’

‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.

I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.

Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel

Vertigo

The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.

He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.

As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.

Earthbound

Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.

The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child

Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.

Elevation

He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.

One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.

Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.

Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.

Venus in Furs

Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models

‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.

He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.

The fetish

Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):

‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”

The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’

– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm

The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.

‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).

Domination

For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.

But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…

‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.

– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.
]]> /2012/06/13/when-you-are-queen-christian-louboutin-at-the-design-museum/feed/ 0 11145 /2011/08/17/the-best-all-girl-pop-group-of-the-80s/ /2011/08/17/the-best-all-girl-pop-group-of-the-80s/#comments Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:00:28 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6902 No, not that one. Or that one. I’m talking about The Go-Go’s.

[WARNING: this post contains controversial opinions. Those of a sensitive nature may wish to look away now.]



Photo: Ron Baker

If I asked you to hum a song by The Bangles, you could probably do it, right? Perhaps this one. What about Bananarama? This might pop into your head. What about The Go-Go’s?

Perhaps you can think of a song, in which case: good work! Gold star. But over and over again I’ve found that people know nothing about them, even though they were one of the most successful girl groups of all time and – quite frankly – better than the other two. (I warned you…)

Here are my top reasons why I love The Go-Go’s and you should too:

1) Perfect pop

Just listen. My favourite is Head Over Heels (I like to think of it as the voice of the girl in Devo’s Out of Sync) but other hits include Our Lips Are Sealed, We Got The Beat and Vacation. Stupendously catchy choruses, simple lyrics, they’re like a revved-up 60s girl group. I guarantee you, one of these tracks will be stuck in your head all day.

Sorry for the terrible sound quality by the way – I thought you’d like to see the videos. There’s another great video for Vacation but the sound was too awful so you’ve got the karaoke version instead.

2) They played their own instruments and wrote their own songs

I’m not dissing The Bangles or Banarama, I love them too. I’m just saying they’re The Monkees to the The Go-Go’s Beatles.

3) For all your 1980s style needs

Think The Bangles or Bananarama have the last word on 80s fashion? Think again: The Go–Go’s may not have had as much hair but they did have VOLUME.

At one point they even looked a bit moody ‘n’ punk. Check out the braces! (Early on they toured with Madness…)

And guitarist Jane Wiedlin has sported some amazing looks:

• Anticipating the 1990s with fairy dress and pixie crop
• Dungarees!
• Top hat!
• …Russian folk chic? She has cool red tights, anyway.

4) Retro ironic album and single covers

Wheeeee! Anne Taintor eat your heart out.

5) Kicked ass in the charts

As someone with a lot invested in her ‘alternative’ identity (and a diehard contrarian) this doesn’t matter much to me. What I find surprising is that they aren’t better known given their chart success. They had a number one album and four Top 20 singles in the US. I read somewhere that they were the first all female group – who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments – to reach number one in the Billboard chart.

6) Better pop patron

I may lose some friends over this one. While The Bangles’ biggest hit, Manic Monday, was written for them by Prince, The Go-Go’s first hit, Our Lips Are Sealed, was co-written by Terry Hall of The Specials. I know who’s cooler. And I think, in your heart, you do too.

7) They get geek points

Because Jane Wiedlin played Joan of Arc in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Communications Officer Trillya in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Win.

I don’t understand why The Go-Go’s are so often overlooked. Hopefully there will soon be an end to this injustice as they’ve been recently been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right outside The Masque club where they played their first gig. They’re also doing a reunion tour, celebrating the 30^th anniversary of their first record, Beauty and the Beat.

Of course it doesn’t matter which was the best 80s all-girl pop group¹ – the important thing is that they were all there, blazin’ a trail for the next generation to follow. If you’re interested in the history of women in pop and rock I recommend reading Lucy O’Brien’s She Bop II, and if you’re interested in what’s happening now head over to the cracking Wears The Trousers music blog².

1. It was The Go-Go’s
2. Ed’s Note: Should you need further encouragement, our very own Rhian’s assistant ed over there, too. So really you can’t go wrong, eh.
]]> /2011/08/17/the-best-all-girl-pop-group-of-the-80s/feed/ 5 6902 /2010/12/13/an-alphabet-of-femininism-11-k-is-for-knickerbocker/ /2010/12/13/an-alphabet-of-femininism-11-k-is-for-knickerbocker/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:00:30 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=1306  

K

KNICKERBOCKER

“I should say that a walking suit in which one could not walk, and a winter suit which exposes the throat, head, and feet to cold and damp, was rather a failure,” said Dr. Alec [who had his own ideas about what his niece should be wearing.]

“Alec, if it is a Bloomer, I shall protest. I’ve been expecting it, but I know I cannot bear to see that pretty child sacrificed to your wild ideas of health. Tell me it isn’t a Bloomer!” and Mrs. Clara clasped her hands imploringly.

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins (1875)

Nope, a knickerbocker. This is a strange word, with an uncertain trajectory from immigration to ladies’ unmentionables, and its progress will here be followed with a suitably bifurcated approach: one leg underwear and one leg outerwear. We meet in the middle.



Work it. A Bloomer from the 1850s.

The word’s first appearance is in capitalised form: Knickerbocker is the name given to ‘a descendent of the original Dutch settlers of the New Netherlands in America; hence, a New Yorker’ – the New ‘Netherlands’ becoming, of course, New ‘York’ after the English got their grubby hands on it.

The everyday appearance of the term must be attributed to Washington Irving’s 1848 History of New York, purported to have been written by one ‘Diedrich Knickerbocker’. A long chain, this name was appropriated from Irving’s pal Herman of the same name, who was in turn descended from Harmen Jansen Knickerbocker (c.1650-1720), one of the original Dutch settlers, who supposedly invented the name. Awesome.

But where are the unmentionables?

It’s Over.

These appear in the second sense of the word, a development on the first, from 1859, where it is pluralised to knickerbockers – ‘Loose-fitting breeches, gathered in at the knee; also extended to the whole costume worn with this’. Irving is once again lurking around, because this usage is said to refer to George Cruikshank’s illustrations of the same opus. Knickerbockers wear knickerbockers. Duh.

These ‘loose-fitting breeches gathered at the knee’ became, in another life, standard wear for little boys, whose breeching (the graduation to trousers) consequently became a coming-of-age moment. Short trousers, of course, facilitated easy, boisterous movement, and in Eight Cousins, quoted above, the incorrigibly fashionable Aunt Clara resents her little niece, Rose, wearing such loose-fitting bifurcated garments: ‘Dress her in that boyish way and she will act like a boy. I do hate all these inventions of strong-minded women!’

So Knickerbockers were not simply a New York trend: they were part of sartorial gender differentiation. Little girls wear restrictive petticoats to keep them ladylike; those boys who have graduated from their baby-skirts wear garments that allow them to be as boyish as necessary. It is no coincidence that, in their modern incarnation, knickerbockers are kept firmly in the domain of sportswear.

Bloomin’ ‘Eck



Cartoon from Punch, 1895.

The ‘Bloomers’ Aunt Clara has such a horror of were the pet project of another Knickerbocker. In the 1850s, Miss Amelia Bloomer, from Cortland County, New York, began a crusade to popularise the ‘Bloomer suit’, not her own invention, but eventually synonymous with her name. This was an Eastern-inspired way to wear your skirt: shorter with the aid of modest, wide-legged trousers that tapered at the knee. Modesty preserved; movement uninhibited. Job done.

But despite enthusiasm from several quarters, Miss Bloomer’s overall success was limited and bloomers themselves roundly mocked in most quarters for being just too weird. In 1859, she dropped her project altogether because of the arrival of a fresh sartorial development, immediately fashionable, sexually appealing and simple – something that, she felt, did the job of fusing modesty, comfort and practicality just as well. And the name of this marvel? The crinoline.

Underneath the Bridge.

The devoted may remember that this strange hooped structure, by virtue of moving independently of its owner, facilitated the easy movement of the legs underneath. Obviously you could not sally around bareback underneath (as you had mostly done before), and thus the ubiquity of pantalettes (elongated drawers). And here comes the bifurcated garment – not yet knickers, for they are still too long to qualify for a diminutive – relegated to underwear.

These pantalettes were not simply loose cotton trousers like the bloomer (although they could be), but frequently two separate garments, one for each leg; their intent was not to cover one’s proverbial shame, but rather to keep the legs out of sight (and rather toasty too). Thus, they frequently bifurcated at the rumpal regions rather than the legs themselves, in which form they remained until the turn of the century.

Daisy, Daisy…

It was the strange innovation of the bicycle that, for the first time since Amelia Bloomer, re-addressed the question of external female knickerbockers, for simple safety purposes. Though the haterz still hated, there was something about this new mode of transport that (literally) mobilised a whole generation of women, storming these shocking garments through to respectability on a bicycle. It may come as small surprise to learn that these sartorial liberators came swingin’ back into fashion in the 1960s, epitomised by Yves St. Laurent’s velvet knickerbocker suit, and extending to gender-neutral clothing, and jeans for both sexes.

Meanwhile, bloomers were beating a retreat up the leg as Mary Quant advanced a new weapon: the ‘mini-skirt’. For the first time, stockings and the bifurcated undergarments worn with them were conflated, and suddenly there was a need for practical brief coverings (with a name to match) to avoid flashing in the streets and, presumably, to protect the designer tights that went over them. Knickers had arrived. The decline of stockings as status quo prompted some to herald a new ‘sexless woman’ (A Good Thing), although this may also have resulted from a vogue for pre-pubescent figures combined with ambiguous schoolgirl traditions: puffed sleeves, pinafores, Mary-Janes and little boy-shorts. A strange sort of liberation, perhaps.



NEXT WEEK: L is for Lady

]]> /2010/12/13/an-alphabet-of-femininism-11-k-is-for-knickerbocker/feed/ 24 1306 /2010/10/15/manolo-inferno/ /2010/10/15/manolo-inferno/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:59:34 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=29 We should have burned high heels instead of bras. I’m not sure why the bra was taken as a symbol of female repression: at least it serves a practical purpose. Bras allow us greater physical comfort and security – especially if you have larger breasts – protecting delicate nipples and posture, reducing the strain on the back and giving the freedom to do exercise without the fear of black eyes.

Ditching bras led to the hippy generation exposing their newly “liberated” breasts, much to the excitement of the male populous, but though the swinging sisters’ knockers were emancipated, their feet remained in chains. Brave souls fought the revolution from the floor up, rejecting those spiky torture devices in favour of Birkenstocks and Doc Martens. Rather than becoming a symbol of a new femininity, they were (and still are) decried as unfeminine, butch, ugly and a little bit silly. Aside from a core group of defiant activists, most women clung on to their high heels and attempted to teeter-totter their way to equality.

As anyone who has ever walked in high heels knows, it’s difficult, it hurts and you make slow progress in exchange for a bit of perceived power and some flattering glances. Which is a pretty good analogy for how women are hampered in general life, so why should we persist in adding to these problems by going along with something that limits us?



It’s important to admit that I own several pairs of high heels, and have even worn them on a number of occasions. There is not a single instance of doing so where, at some point, I haven’t wished I’d worn flats instead. I am pretty certain that the only reason I ever wear them is because I think they make me look “sexy”. Yet, I know that I don’t always feel sexy in them. For the first few minutes, yes. Then I often feel footsore, annoyed, uncomfortable and insecure. Which is hardly sexy as I understand it.

Understand this instead – high heels make me feel sexy because I have been socially conditioned to believe that they do. There’s a lot of wibble that is spouted over how high heels emphasise the curve of the calf, or mimic the way the foot appears in orgasm (I actually know very few people who look at their partners’ feet during climax). These are all smokescreen attempts to try and make the high heels = sexy equation make sense. In reality, we (men and women) think that they are sexy because society tells us that they are sexy. Because of the hundreds of thousands of images and descriptions of sex and sexual arousal that involve high heels. In the same way that black lace, Haagen Dasz, the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, red silk and feather boas are put in the big box of “sexiness” these are things that we have repeatedly conflated over and over and over again with sex until they are themselves signifiers of sexiness.

And who doesn’t want to be sexy? The problem is that high heels have become entwined with an idealised feminine sexuality that actually has very little to do with real women having real sex.

In order to be considered either feminine or sexy, we have to adopt these symbolically and socially appropriate signals to show off how attractive and womanly we really are.

High heels are a fetishised (often literally) and almost untouchably sacred shibboleth of accessing femininity: a litmus test for being a “real woman”. In fact, that act of wearing high heels for the first time, perhaps from our mother’s wardrobe, is almost a rite of passage. I never did this because my mother, also a tall woman, didn’t own any, which may go some way to explaining my perspective on heels. Being able to walk in high heels is a desirable skill, which women should learn in order to be “properly” sexy. Although it is also possible that if you feel you have to wear them in order to feel feminine then learning how to walk in them is a necessary survival mechanism to avoid falling over all the time.

The high heel, and walking on it, is part of the mask of constructed femininity, ways in which we contort our bodies into more socially-accepted shapes. Alongside corsets, padded bras, make-up and so on, the high heel is a tool in the Frankenstein workshop in which we create these fake shapes, themselves a distortion and extension of our own shapes to the point where our “natural” bodies look like failures, consistently being too big here or too small there.

We are addicted to high heels, and like many addictions, they are not good for us.

I have friends who adore high heels, including a friend who has several pairs she has never worn and dedicates a portion of her life to the process of breaking in new ones. The stock responses when I criticise high heels is that they make you taller, especially when compared with men, they make your legs look better and that they are pretty. I understand all of these points. I also understand that there’s a need to dig deeper into those reasons and appreciate that they centre more around feelings about power and self-worth than bits of leather and plastic on your feet.

Height is associated with power. We perceive “taller” as being better and physically attractive. It’s no wonder then that women, when they want to look powerful and sexy, try and be taller. Men too, but they have a genetic advantage, certainly over women, in that area, and a social constraint against trying too hard and fussing over their appearance.



The female dolls can't stand up without their high heels...

For women, no such luck – in fact, not trying enough and not “dressing up” properly for social occasions can sometimes cause offence, even amongst other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say especially from other women. Our heel addiction is something we push on other each other, like crazy drugged-up people giggling whilst encouraging our sober friends to try just one little inch. Then another, then another. There’s a tendency to blame mysterious (male) fashion gurus for difficult or challenging clothing that doesn’t suit or fit or just plain makes us feel silly. But the vast majority of the social force behind wearing heels comes from other women.

Which is actually a good thing. Because it means that we can stop it. We know that sexiness is something that is socially defined – certainly over time and across different cultures what it is to be sexy has looked totally different. And so too, what has been considered feminine. We can control it, by choosing to accept or reject these ideas. High heels have no more and no less control over about our femininity, our power or our sexiness than we, collectively, let them. In and of themselves, shoes are just bloody shoes. I realise that in saying this I am committing deep heresy and may as well hand in my women’s club membership card and will have any number of women ready to beat me to death with their precious designer spikes. This of course, only really goes to emphasise my point.

We need a heel amnesty. All of us, as one, should take them off and put on those beloved trainers that we only wear on a “scruffy” day, those boots that make us feel like we could kick the arse of the world, those flip flops that remind us of wandering along the beach, free for a day. If we all gave them up, we could all stop trying to compete in the height stakes and learn to accept ourselves – even just a tiny bit – for being the shape we are. Which is a natural, normal, comfortable and above all, powerful shape. Your shape: the one that you own and navigate the world in and which lets you run, jump and move like a human being rather than with the stiff gait of socially-conditioned sexiness.

Women of the world – buy comfy shoes! You have nothing to lose but a few inches!

And remember, it’s not height that it’s important. It’s stature.

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