Tonight:
4°c
When I got dressed yesterday I stepped into the black heels I'd thrown off late the night before. Like creatures that shouldn't see the light of day, they rattled stonily on the pavement with that satisfying high-heel noise. They might have said: “I mean business” as I stomped around the office but actually they whispered: “I went to bed too late, got up too early and got dressed in the dark.”
Unwittingly I had strayed into a war zone: this week the TUC said it would like to see heels, which it terms “sexist” and “inappropriate”, outlawed in employers' dress codes. Suddenly I'd been elevated not just by a key few inches but to the status of an activist.
As though her Louboutins were about to be impounded, Tory MP Nadine Dorries raged in the blogosphere: “I feel like a lone voice speaking out for every woman … Don't worry, girls. I will not give up on this. The unions will not have their way and defeminise us.”
There is something irresistible in the idea that one of the final acts of Brown-era dreariness could be the banning of heels.
Beyond the delicious fantasy, I don't think it needs either the TUC or a gathering of chiropodists to establish that they are dangerous. There is after all a book by Camilla Morton titled How to Walk in High Heels. Let's face it: in heels, negotiating stairs unaided or without a rail is problematic.
Marilyn Monroe used to cut the ends off hers to put her off-balance — as though she was permanently about to fall into someone's arms. Today, the ever-increasing height of heels makes that unnecessary. It's perfectly possible to wobble in shoes by Charlotte Olympia (a favourite of Kate Moss) or DSquared2, responsible for Gwyneth Paltrow's vamped-up look.
Yet the idea that high heels are “sexist” is ridiculous. The old-school fantasy of men going weak at the knees for heels has been eclipsed by women who lose all sense of reason over the most elaborate and artful creations that they can get their hands on. Their patron saint is Carrie Bradshaw: we knew her sometime boyfriend Aidan's days were numbered when his hound ate a Manolo Blahnik and he offered the excuse: “It's just a shoe.”
I'm 5ft 10½. As a gawky teenager, my frankly overgrown look meant that heels were not my thing. It wasn't until fairly recently (my boyfriend is quite a bit taller than me) that I became a heel-wearer. There's no going back. It's true to say that, whether it's for fun or work, I now consider them part of going out — or “glamming up” as the time-warped TUC so quaintly puts it.
My favourites are without doubt my first pair of Jimmy Choos — beautiful, utterly impractical and proudly purchased with my ill-gotten gains.
The TUC claims the country would save two million wasted days every year taken off because of heel-related injuries. But when is the last time anyone rang in sick with a blister? It's hard to think of another modern invention women might like to be less “saved” from. Mascara, perhaps?
Soggy voyage of discovery
On Tuesday I took up an invitation from production company Arts Co and arts charity Outset to visit Contemporary Row — a group of spaces right off the beaten track. Collectors and the curious met at Gainsborough Studios to jump on a barge that meandered off east along the Regent's Canal.
The contemporary art world is often thought of as brutally commercial but many of the spaces we visited are not-for-profit, existing simply to incubate young talents before they hit the shark-infested big time in Hoxton and the West End.
En route to Matt's Gallery, our final stop, the skies opened: in true Enid Blyton style, our picnic tea proved all the more novel — this barge had no roof. Suffering for your art has never been as much fun.
Feeling sheepish about my farm
Embarrassingly, I have a farm on Facebook, complete with pumpkins, two chickens and a cherry tree. I am one of 13.4 million other bucolic mugs in the fastest-growing Facebook game of all time, Farmville. It's the only game I play and it's worrying addictive, largely on account of the cute graphics.
I can't help thinking visitors to e-coli-stricken Godstone Farm, and the children left distraught by the heartless slaughter of Marcus the school sheep, might have been better off logging on here. So far there seems to be neither an outbreak function or one for slaughter. Baa!
* To the BFI for a preview of the Charles Darwin biopic Creation. What's greatest to see about this film is its sense of grandeur. There's nothing constrained or inexpensive about it — yet it's intimate and clever, too. Director Jon Amiel has paid tribute to his lead actor Paul Bettany's capacity to portray the life of the mind. Films about intellectuals are usually terrible because that's such a difficult task. While I'm no scientist, Bettany's Darwin is a genuine exception to the rule.
Reader views (4)
Dont think i've heard of an employer requiring its totty to wear high heels. The opposition clearly comes from the tofu chomping, cropped hair, monkey boot wearers who believe that if a woman looks feminine when she must have been required/forced to dress in that way rather than exercising a freedom of choice.
As long as women aren't falling off of them too often and causing injury to self and others in the work place then i'm certain the guys wont mind helping them up.
- Frank, London UK, 18/09/2009 11:03
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I'm puzzled: where do you get the claim that the TUC wants to ban high heels from? Yes, the TUC has said people shouldn't be *forced* to wear high heels at work, i.e. that it should be up to individuals to decide for themselves. But that's a completely different story, isn't it?
- Mark Pack, London, 18/09/2009 10:43
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Dear goodness. How many times must it be said that the TUC is not calling for a *ban* on high heels - it is merely asking that employers stop *requiring* employees to wear high heels as part of a uniform. How very unsurprising that you swallowed Nadine Dorries' mendacious line unthinkingly and without the most basic of fact-checks.
And how dare Dorries, on that note, claim to speak for all women? The fact that she calls us "girls" (how very patronising) and then equates wearing heels with femininity (so I'm unfeminine for wearing flats?) just illustrates how ignorant she really is.
This is a real non-issue that right-wingers have gleefully distorted in order to engage in a spot of union-bashing. A very unenlightening spectacle, really.
On a slightly different topic, I think kids should be *more* exposed to the realities of farming, not less. Meat doesn't come from plastic and polythene wrappers, after all; denying or obfuscating the connection between the gambolling lamb and the tasty chop leads to all kinds of unhealthy and unrealistic attitudes about food, and promotes a tweely artifical and unsustainable approach to questions of food sourcing and ethics.
- Jo, London, UK, 17/09/2009 12:53
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Of course the TUC is not proposing that the wearing of high heels and other shoes be banned in the workplace. Instead, it is saying that wearing them shoud not be compulsory, as it currently is in some places.
- Jw, London, UK, 17/09/2009 12:08
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