How to Lose a Million Dollars

Falling in love with high heels; agony becomes ecstasy

A friend said to me recently, “What’s with the high heels?” She was referring to the fact that I had posted a picture of my new shoes, which happen to be gorgeous and also happen to be high heels. Anyone who knows me would have been surprised by the picture, so the question didn’t shock me. I have never been a heel girl. As I have observed previously, I have long been an aficionado of big fat shoes, earthbound bangers that rooted me to the pavement.

“What’s with the heels?'“

This isn’t a genetic predisposition. My mother was a heel person, through and through. She didn’t own a single pair of oxfords or brogues or driving shoes: Her footwear wardrobe consisted of dressy heels and less dressy heels. The one exception were her sneakers. My mother was an avid tennis player. Even into her 80s, she played several times a week, often with partners who were decades her junior. She had a tennis racket charm on her loaded-up charm bracelet—a requisite jewelry item for women of her generation. The tiny golden racket (with a diamond chip ball) hung right next to (or maybe in front of?) the three baby-shoe charms that represented her three kids. At a point when most of the women her age were employing tennis balls mostly as bumpers to pad the struts of their walkers, my mom was playing doubles three or four times a week, and complaining that she wanted to play more but was having trouble rounding up a foursome.

A tasteful block heel, nothing too vertiginous.

My mom probably started wearing high heels as soon as she could walk. As a result, her feet had a permanent arch formed by walking on your tiptoes for eighty-some years. Looking at her feet made me understand Chinese foot-binding. I can’t imagine how she unbent her foot to fit into tennis shoes, but somehow she managed it. She had regular visits with a chiropodist—do those still exist?—who shaved her calluses and rubbed her bunions and whittled her cuticles. Never once did he suggest she should stop wearing high heels. She wouldn’t have paid him any mind even if he had. Once, when I was home for a visit, my mom noticed that I was wearing Birkenstocks, and she exclaimed, “Susie! Don’t those flat things hurt your feet?” I know it broke her heart in a million pieces when I wore them with dresses.

Even when many of my friends made the transition from the clodhoppers of their college years into the Ladies Shoe Department, I didn’t budge. I just didn’t moon over pretty, delicate sky-high mules. I appreciated the fanciful design and the almost impossible engineering of, say, Christian Louboutins, but I did not yearn for them. For one thing, I couldn’t walk in them. For another, I didn’t wear the kind of clothes or lead the kind of life that called out for such shoes, and wearing them with my kind of clothing—jeans, shorts, pajamas—looked slutty. I remember the first time I put on heels with jeans, just for fun, and felt instantly that I was channeling a drunk housewife: That was the look. Also, truth be told, heels made me, or more exactly, my legs, look elephantine: Unless you had toothpick calves, wearing fragile little sling-backs make regular legs look like mighty redwoods. No thank you. Other friends fell hard for Manolo and the like, but I stayed true to my chunky clunkers. I felt rich realizing all the money I wasn’t spending.

Here’s the thing, though: I am not tall. In fact, I am short. Once I discovered platform shoes, which were really just flat shoes on risers (you can even get platform sneakers and platform Birkenstocks), I could appreciate how having a few more inches changed my perspective on the universe. I could even begin to appreciate how an elongated leg was flattering. I am not ignorant of the sociological postulation on the meaning of high heels—the elevated rump, the mincing walk signaling one’s availability for mating without a fight, blah blah blah—but now I could begin to see how they kinda looked good. One day, walking home up Sixth Avenue from my office at The New Yorker, I noticed a pair of modest black pumps in the window of a shop. Why I stopped to try them, I can’t say, but to my astonishment they were extremely comfortable, and even though the heel was substantial, I could walk in them with as much swagger as I did in my sneakers. They weren’t a fancy brand or particularly beautiful, but something seized me and I bought them. And I walked home in them. Me! Trudging several miles uptown in freaking high heels! If only my mother could see me.

That was an era when I wore a lot of Romeo Gigli, particularly pantsuits and blazers, like this one, and never in a million years would I have pictured wearing heels with them—his clothes were so prettily boyish, like something a very rich eunuch would wear, and the only thing I could think of wearing with them were oxfords, but seeing myself in the mirror in my castrato finery and heels was genuinely revelatory. It was so complicated and paradoxical! And really quite fabulous. I marched home feeling like a million bucks, which was about the amount of money that would eventually seep out of my bank account to keep the merriment going, given my new reverence for high heels. I won’t say I’ve deformed my feet, à la ma mère, but these days I am quite capable of trotting around in a modest stiletto without falling on my face. On an ordinary day I still wear sneakers and Birkenstocks or a pair of the finest boots the world has ever known (from the Australian outfitter RM Williams) but when occasion calls, I am in heels. Now and again, for fun, I will wear them with the wrong thing—shorts, for instance—and embrace it as good and tarty, because why not? And once wearing socks with high heels became a thing (and what a good thing it is) nothing could stop me.

The shoes that prompted my friend’s alarm, the ones pictured at the start of this post, came to my attention via a photograph in a fashion magazine. I thought they were the most beautiful shoes I’d ever seen. Manolo Blahnik made them. I had always resisted the siren call of Manolos, because they cost so much and were more precious than I liked, even now that I dig heels. They were just a little too much muchness. But these shoes, my god. I tore out the picture and kept it on my nightstand, as if it were the picture of a movie star. I stalked those fucking shoes, for real. I checked the Manolo website like a fiend, and began to worry that these shoes were a one-off made for the photo shoot (this does happen, I’m here to tell ya). And finally, months after the magazine feature, they appeared for sale on the website, and they were available in my size. They cost much more than any shoes I’d ever bought, so I decided to order them just to have them in my house for a day or two. I would be their foster parent, and then I would send them, pronto, back to the shelter so someone nice could adopt them. Yeah, well, that was the plan. What can I say? They make me happier than they really ought to, but who can argue with love?

SHOW NOTES

—While googling “Romeo Gigli” the most adorable coat popped up (algorithms are so weird). It bears little resemblance to anything Mr. Gigli would have designed except that it’s whimsical and cool: Orla Long Coat

—I’m not kidding about those RM Williams boots. I’ve had them for more than twenty years, replacing them once because they finally looked a little weary (I didn’t get rid of the old ones; just kept them for rough wear).

—This past weekend was the LA Festival of Books, which was really fun and really gigantic (evidently, it’s now the largest book festival in the US). Talk about nerd prom: I ran into everyone I’ve ever known within minutes of arriving. I had no official duties except to have a good time, and I succeeded wildly.