The Weird Cultural Shift Over High Heeled Shoes

Pictured above is a famous portrait of Louis XIV of France from 1701. You’ll immediately notice that doesn’t look like like a male leader would in today’s world. The man known as the Sun King is wearing what could pass for a blue-and-gold blanket adorned with a pattern of fleur-de-lis. His hair is audacious and his pose is something you’d expect from a risqué vaudeville performer, not a French king. Topping it all off — or, I guess, bottoming it — are dainty white shoes with large, bright red heels, making the 5’4” king appear significantly taller. By modern standards, he’d be considered avant-garde.

But for his time, he wasn’t — he was being masculine. Especially with his footwear.

High heel shoes, it turns out, were originally designed for men — specifically, for men who wanted to kill people more efficiently.

The history of high heels dates back to Persia of the 10th century, where cavalry soldiers needed something that would keep them stable while shooting arrows from horseback. The solution: a raised heel that locked into the stirrup, allowing riders to stand and aim without slipping. As the BBC explains, “when the soldier stood up in his stirrups, the heel helped him to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more effectively.” It was practical military gear, nothing more — the height boost wasn’t the original goal. But over time, the shoes became something much more interesting.

In 1599, Persia’s Shah Abbas I sent a diplomatic mission to the courts of Europe, and his envoys arrived wearing those heeled riding boots — and were towering over their European counterparts. The European aristocrats took one look and decided they wanted in on the action. Height projects power, and adopting a foreign military style came with an air of warrior-like prowess and exotic masculinity. Within decades, the European elite were tottering around in increasingly tall shoes — despite the fact that the shoes served absolutely no practical purpose on the muddy, rutted streets of Paris or London, to say the least. In fact, that was probably the point. As Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum told the BBC, “one of the best ways that status can be conveyed is through impracticality.”

Louis XIV took this logic to its extreme. He wore heels as high as four inches, always colored red — a dye that was expensive, signaling his deep wealth. In 1670, he issued an edict declaring that only members of his court could wear red heels. According to Google Arts & Culture, you could literally tell who was in the king’s good graces by glancing at their footwear. Red heels meant royal favor; anything else, not so much.

At around the same time, women also found a fondness for high heels. Starting in the early to mid 1600s, women began adopting the footwear as part of a broader trend of borrowing masculine fashion — cutting their hair short, adding military-style decorations to their clothes, and even smoking pipes. Shoe choice was a natural next step (pardon the pun). But by the late 1600s, the shoes began splitting along gender lines. Men’s heels became squarer and sturdier; women’s grew slender and curved. And then came the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality and practical dress. Philosophers argued that educated men of any class could become citizens, while women were dismissed as emotional and irrational. As the 1700s came to a close, men started eschewing anything seen as women’s wear as part of a movement called the Great Male Renunciation. High heels — impractical, decorative, and now seen as feminine — led the list of attire no longer acceptable for men to wear.

The heel didn’t disappear from men’s wardrobes completely, of course. Cowboy boots kept the Persian cavalry tradition alive, their angled heels still serving the original stirrup-gripping purpose. The Beatles brought Cuban heels back into fashion in the 1960s. David Bowie strutted around in platforms. But for most men, the association with femininity proved impossible to shake. As CNN noted, even today, men who wear noticeable heels are often seen as “subverting gender norms,” even though they’re just reclaiming something that belonged to men for centuries.

Louis XIV, at least, would have understood. In his court, the higher your heels, the more powerful you were. The fact that they were utterly useless for walking? To him, that was kind of the whole point. Fashion trends often feel timeless and inevitable, but high heels are a reminder that ideas about masculinity and femininity can flip completely over time.

Bonus fact: In 1985, researchers were able to finally discover the wreck of the Titanic — and found something unexpected. Robert Ballard, one of the leads of the expedition to the bottom of the ocean, noticed — in the words of Wikipedia — “pairs of shoes [ . . . ] lying next to each other on the sea bed.” Over the decades since the massive ship sank, the bodies of those on board decayed, but the shoes — likely due to the tannin in the shoe leather — were still mostly well-preserved.

From the Archives: Patent Leather Shoes: Michael Jackson’s gravity defying footwear.