Stilettos don’t have to mean crippled feet

Rosamund Urwin
3 Feb 2010

Victoria Beckham's stilt heels have given her bunions. Rosamund Urwin refuses to heed the warning...

I only own two pairs of flat shoes: trainers and a single set of red ballet pumps. The rest of my collection wouldn't rival Victoria Beckham's in size but it certainly would in height: no other shoe falls shy of three inches and my tallest Jimmy Choos stand proud at five inches high. Each night, I pack the stilettos away in their original boxes, filled with shoe trees, while the trainers and pumps are flung on the floor.

Since I left university five years ago, I have rarely been out of vertiginous heels. Even in my student days, I sometimes walked the cobbled streets to lectures in danger of toppling over. Imagine then the surprise of my politics tutor when he found out that the girl tottering in shoes she could barely walk in was a fully-fledged feminist, the kind who normally rants about patriarchy inflicting such ludicrous demands on women.

But I don't buy the line about architectural heels holding us back. I have run for buses and danced all night in them. So much so that they now feel like extensions of my legs - when I take them off, I feel naked. And short. I love to wear them, and while no doubt some will say this is a sell-out, I find them empowering.

While Mrs Beckham is being forced to hang up her killer heels, mine have never inflicted any great pain: no bunions, no blisters, no ache in the knees. The skin sometimes becomes rough on the balls of my feet but it is nothing I can't fix at home with a buffer.

To avoid Posh-style pain, I pick shoes with a platform at the front to absorb more of the pressure and I switch pairs daily. The afore-mentioned Dorothy shoes do serve a purpose too - if I'm walking more than a mile, I tend to slip them on.

And your mother really was right when she said people always notice cheap shoes: the wearer most of all. There is a reason why most of my shoes came with a hefty price tag.

Designer shoes - be they Miu Mius, Manolos or McQueens - really are better for you than the high street rip-offs. While others invest in stocks, I have invested in the future of my feet.

Like Victoria Beckham, though, I recently went over to the short side, pledging to give up high heels. My abstinence was self-imposed, however, as I am running the London marathon in April, and decided that perhaps my feet couldn't take the twin demands of training and mega-heels. Three days in, I developed a blister - from my flats.

I lasted a week, before the pull of Alexander McQueen's patent peep-toe pumps had me rushing back. It seems the flesh is willing but my soles are weak. Why do I love them so? As the model Veronica Webb said: "High heels put your ass on a pedestal." It may go against my feminist principles, but recommendations don't come much higher than that.