When Men Wore Heels
Heels on men’s footwear have become a kind of fashion statement now, but they already were way back then
There is a sort of unspoken rule in men’s wear, whether formal or casual, that heels on footwear can’t be too high; for some reason, men’s heels don’t rise beyond an inch. But a recent trend of male celebrities sporting heels, in such heights usually only seen in women’s footwear, appears to be challenging the rule. Some even see such fashion statements as somewhat gender-bending, further blurring gender boundaries and in line with the current climate of identity politics. But if you look at the history of this particular item of clothing, men on heels aren’t anything new. In fact, it may have started as a male item and, at a point in time, was a symbol of the rich and powerful.
High fashion: Louis XIV’s red heels
A quick look at full body portraits from Europe from around the 16th century onwards would show that men did wear heels. But these men, being the subject of such an expensive medium, invariably come from a particular class: the nobility. Take this portrait of Louis XIV of France wearing a dashing pair of heels:
People were depicted distinctly in portraits like this. Back then, portraiture wasn’t anything like taking a photograph, which for us today are mostly instant and thoughtless affairs. It was a sober undertaking that resulted not just in a practical visual record (this was probably the lesser concern) but a representation of how you wanted to be seen, a projection of power. This portrait was no exception.
Considering this, one can’t help but notice that, among other things like his garbs and shapely legs, Louis seems to be flaunting his heels as well. Rightly so, because he made a rule in the 1670s that restricted the wearing of heels to the nobility, and reserved the red-colored heel — les talons rouges, as he’s shown wearing — for the most favored nobles. Such was the idiosyncrasies of the so-called “Sun King,” a firm adherent of divine right monarchy and who, for most of his reign, was the most powerful ruler in Europe.
The height of power: heels in battle
Why heels though? Like most of the king’s draperies, a pair of heels just screams impractical and unnecessary. But also like the excess of cloth, which was a luxury item at the time, the heels signalled wealth. Heels are the last thing you’d wear in doing manual labor, which was what most people did back then. So other than the rich and the nobility who didn’t need to do hard work to earn a living, no one else could really do justice to such items of clothing. Can you imagine a peasant, toiling in the fields, wearing heels? No, he’d just get it all mudded. A pair of pristine heels was an implicit display that you were beyond such concerns by virtue of your wealth.
Another point worth considering is the history of the item. Heels didn’t start off as a fashion item. History tends to show us that even the most symbolic items started with practical purposes. Take a crown, for example. A crown doesn’t really serve any purpose other than to symbolize one’s nobility, but we know that crowns first appeared as a helmet, or a similar headgear used in battle, that started to be used in a ceremonial manner, eventually evolving into the “crown” as we now know it. Heels share a similar history in warfare. An early known use for it was in horse riding, where heels helped riders to get more control of the stirrups, thus aiding in battle while on horseback (hence the heels in cowboy boots that we still have today). The portrait above shows a pair of heeled boots on a cavalier, the supporters of the monarchy during the English Civil War. The boots are stylized, typical of the depictions of cavaliers in fashionable clothing, but the boot spikes show the practical side of the heeled boots in horse riding.
So the symbolism attached to heels’ use in battle can also be considered: it meant you had the power to crush your enemies. One can thus see the link between heeled footwear and the nobility in that both of them share a history in warfare. In the same way that crowns first began as a helmet, heels also had a specific use in battle. Monarchy and aristocracy, on the other hand, also trace their development from war leaders, those who from time immemorial have been powerful enough to wage and win wars. In real life use, heels do give a pretty damaging stomp. It is indeed fascinating that stomping one’s heels, something we’d now consider as rather feminine, may have originally carried connotations of masculine and military power.
