In Praise of the Stiletto Heel

The Dioressence stiletto

Photo: Marton Perlaki for Dior

According to Camille Paglia, the stiletto heel is "modern woman's most lethal social weapon". Nevertheless, she concedes that wearing a pair incurs a cost - and we're not just talking money here. 

For no other form of footwear illustrates the fact so perfectly that culture, style and sexual elegance are refined forms of cruelty. Self-mutilation, it seems, is the price of high-heeled beauty. Still, no pain, no gain - as Jewish elders, sadomasochists, fashionistas and fitness coaches like to say. And wise women everywhere know the magic that an exquisite pair of stilettos can work on the body:

"The high heel creates the illusion of a lengthened leg by shortening the calf muscle, arching the foot, and crushing the toes, forcing breasts and buttocks out in a classic hominid posture of sexual invitation."

They don't call them fuck me shoes for nothing ...

And there's a good reason also why they are so loved by fetishsists; for a woman in stilettos is paradoxically vulnerable and threatening at one and the same time - she can't run, but she can grind her weaponised heel into your foot (or your face, or your genitals) à la Elizabeth Taylor as the most desirable woman in town, Gloria Wandrous, in BUtterfield 8 (dir. Daniel Mann, 1960).

As Paglia notes, the stiletto is thus far from simply a shoe; it's an iconic cultural artefact of disturbing complexity and the woman who wears it becomes both a seductress with an "aura of sadistic glamour" and  a pure object of male desire; she can be fucked, but she can also "lance and castrate".

Whilst true that women have worn high-heeled shoes for hundred of years, the uniquely tall and narrow stiletto - named after the thin Italian dagger much favoured by Renaissance assassins - is very much a piece of mid-twentieth design; born when post-war technology finally made it possible to create a convex heel using metal rather than traditional wood that narrowed to a dramatic, dangerous, and potentially deadly point.

Doctors warned against wearing them on medical grounds and many places banned the heels fearing they would damage the flooring or tear holes in their precious fucking carpets. And this is why one has to love them; their impracticality defies all utilitarian logic and their hazardous nature contravenes every bit of heath and safety legislation. As well as saying fuck me, stilettos scream fuck you and fuck off.   

Despite all the voices raised against them, the heels remained popular throughout the late-fifties and early-sixties with all the most stylish women of the time and they have continued to function as one of fashion's most powerful symbols of ultra-femininity, never quite disappearing from either the highstreet or the pornographic imagination.

Indeed, in his final collection as creative director at Dior (S/S 16), designer Raf Simons gave us his take on Roger Vivier's classic heel - the so-called Dioressence stiletto (pictured above). Offered in a lovely array of colours - including ochre, bronze, and Trafalgar red - as well as the traditional black, the shoes are available in lamb or calfskin and come with either a 7cm or 10cm heel - and a provocative price tag that dares you to buy them.

Whilst rather surprisingly (and disappointingly) deploring "their horrifying cost at a time of urgent social needs", Paglia nevertheless admits to wandering round the luxury shoe hall of her local department store and being ravished by their beauty:

"Despite my detestation of its decadence, this theatrical shoe array has for years provided me with far more intense aesthetic surprise and pleasure than any gallery of contemporary art, with its derivative gestures, rote ironies, and exhausted ideology."

She concludes:

"Designer shoes represent the slow but steady triumph of the crafts over the fine arts during the past century. They are streamlined works of modern sculpture, wasteful and frivolous yet elegantly expressive of pure form, a geometric reshaping of soft and yielding nature."         


See: Camille Paglia, 'The Stiletto Heel', in Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 187-90.

The Case of Evelyn McHale (The Most Beautiful Suicide in the World)

Photo of Evelyn McHale, by Robert C. Wiles. 

For poets, there is nothing more romantic than the suicide of someone young; particularly if they take their lives with an element of style and manage to leave behind them a good-looking corpse. And no one has managed to achieve this feat with more success than an attractive, twenty-three year old bookkeeper, called Evelyn McHale, in 1947.

Hers is often described as the most beautiful suicide in the world and I’m happy to share this view. What makes her case so magnificent and not merely tragic (or mundane), are the following six points:

1. She chose a magical date, May 1st, an ancient spring festival, on which to make her self-sacrifice, thereby lending her death a certain mythical aspect or celebratory pagan splendour.

2. She chose the right method for her location. When in Berlin, for example, one should swallow poison or use a gun; in London, it’s appropriate to throw oneself from a bridge into the Thames, or onto the tracks of the Underground before an approaching train. But, as Serge Gainsbourg observed, New York is all about the astonishing height of its buildings. And so, when in NYC, one simply has to jump.

3. Having chosen, rightly, to jump, Evelyn then selected one of the two truly great and truly iconic modern structures from which to leap: the Empire State Building. This 102-story skyscraper, located in Midtown Manhattan, is, with its beautiful art deco design, the perfect place from which to fall to one’s death and since its opening in 1931 only a select number of lucky souls have had the privilege (and fatal pleasure) of plunging from this iconic site.

4. She was impeccably dressed for the occasion, with gloves and a simple, but elegant, pearl necklace. Before jumping she calmly removed her coat and neatly folded it over the wall of the 86th floor observation deck. She also left behind her a make-up kit, some family snaps, and a suicide note written in a black pocketbook, in which she asked to be cremated without any kind of fuss or service of remembrance. In other words, even in death, Evelyn kept her composure - which brings us to our fifth point:

5. She didn’t land with an undignified splat on the pavement of 34th Street; but, rather, with a crash onto the roof of a waiting car. And it wasn't just any old car - it was a UN Assembly limousine, as if she wanted to make an impression on the entire world. And impression, as we see from the photo above, is the key word here. For Evelyn literally impressed herself into the roof of the Cadillac, so that it seemed to fold round her, with metallic tenderness. There is almost nothing to suggest the terrible violence of the scene - apart from the ripped stockings and the absence of shoes.

6. She conspired with fate to ensure there was a photographer nearby to instantly capture the event of her death on film; thereby ensuring her place within the cultural imagination. Indeed, fifteen years later, Andy Warhol would incorporate her image into his work, just as he did images of other beautiful women, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

As for the student photographer, Robert C. Wiles, he also struck it lucky that day; his astonishing photo of Evelyn was published in Life Magazine as a full-page 'Picture of the Week' in the May 12 issue. It was his first - and last - photo ever to be published and one likes to imagine he hung his camera up after taking this perfect shot, but I don't know if this is true or not.

I'll stop here - but I could of course talk about (and darkly caress) this topic forever. For Camus was right: there is only one truly serious philosophical question - and that is the question of suicide.