How many heels do you have in your closet?
How many of these shoes can you really wear every day?
Heels are the joy and delight of the female: we have been taught that there is a direct proportion between "pin height" and "the success of the wearer".
Beautiful, winning, sensual women who show up in films and advertisements always show off high heels on which to stand out.
The heel is an element of empowerment, helping the wearer to dominate situations from above and to feel in a position of security and determination.
And it is precisely to a small woman that we owe the use of the heels that we know.
On 28 October 1533, Caterina De Medici decided, in fact, that she could not seem even smaller than she already was, just the day of her wedding with the tall and slender Henry II of France, and so she wore under the wide skirts of the shoes with 7 cm heel.
Heels embellish, slender, powerful but are not comfortable, indeed the expression comfortable heel seems to be almost an oxymoron.
What does the History of Fashion tell us about it?
Heels in the eighteenth century were present on both women's and men's shoes.
At a certain point, however, in the Venetian salons, we began to see shoes that were only for women.
They were like these and were called "Calcagni".
For a long time, it was thought that they were used to protect the feet from the high water, typical of the lagoon city in some months of the year.
In truth, if we look at the women's clothing of the time, we realize that the Calcagni was the perfect accompaniment.
If it is true that men and women used colored and patterned fabrics and high-heeled shoes, in the same measure, it is also true that women's clothes combined the desire to "see and be seen", typical of the time, with a sense of submission and constraint.
The base of the women's clothes was a real scaffold, the women's skirts were long and rich in fabric. On the other hand, the fabric was an expensive commodity and therefore the more meters draped the clothes of the ladies, the more highlighted the economic fortune of her husband.
The husband: the woman was only a beautiful statue carrying the property of others but it was not possible to own anything. With long skirts, masking legs and feet, ready to prevent even the very idea of movement.
Here's the sense of the heels: a woman standing on those high stilts could not do anything but stand there and be watched.
And so it was that the heels from tool to "rise" became yet another element of constraint and conditioning to the female.
From the nineteenth century on, heels became a "women's issue".
It was in this period that the man decided to make "the great renunciation", stating that fashion is a thing for women and that a true gentleman can not deal with such futility. Fashion becomes an all-female communication tool and so do heels.
In the 1920s and 1930s heels became comfortable and practical.
During the First World War, women had replaced the men at the front in the workplace and had discovered the possibility of emancipation, even often after many painful losses and economic hardship (just as had happened to Coco Chanel). Their high-heeled shoes had to take them easily to work in the morning, often on public transport, and then accompany them to dance in the evening in jazz clubs.
It was in this period that an Italian shoemaker who had made his fortune in America before his homeland, named Salvatore Ferragamo, invented a new type of heel: the wedge.
Result of in-depth studies on the anatomy of the foot, with the desire to combine the search for beauty with the desire for comfort. It is not by chance that Ferragamo, at the first test of custom-made shoes, always asked his customers: "do you feel your feet free enough?".
During the Second World War, shoes became thick and heavy.
As well as the thoughts of women eager for stability in a great moment of concern, ready to arm their clothes with wide straps, borrowed not by chance from the military-style.
This is the skyscraper shilouette designed by Elsa Schiaparelli who, as I'll tell you here, had also invented, with Salvador Dalì, a shoe hat with a pink coloured heel.
In the 50s, height returns!
Christian Dior satisfied the female desire for lightness by proposing clothes in which women could feel fresh and romantic, like freshly blossomed flowers.
Corolla dresses, dresses that were ideal for women tired of the ugliness of the previous period and willing to put on the corset again, just to dream again.
And along with the corset, the high heels that become "stilettos" also come back.