In 2004, Tom Ford left Gucci, and I for one couldn’t have been happier. He was going to Hollywood to make films, and unless they were sequels to Sex and the City, I felt confident that he’d leave women’s feet alone. By then, however, the Cult of the High Heel had firmly taken hold. Ford’s muse, Carine Roitfeld, who was famous for her bondage stilettos, had become editor of French Vogue. With the growing popularity of street-style photography, Roitfeld was impossible to escape, striding confidently from one fashion show to another in dominatrix footwear that soon became standard wear for other editors, retailers, stylists, celebrities, and fashion-conscious women everywhere.
“A shoe has so much more to offer than just to walk,” Christian Louboutin told The New Yorker. Indeed, locomotion has very little to do with the Louboutin aesthetic, which takes its cue from traditional fetish wear. Though Louboutin had been making shoes since the early 1990s, he didn’t achieve widespread recognition until he introduced his Very Prive platform in 2006. With its aggressive contours and nearly five-inch heel, the Very Prive transformed its wearer into a tower of kinkiness. A year later, Louboutin collaborated with Twin Peaks creator David Lynch on Fetish, a darkly twisted photographic exhibit featuring a pair of naked women posed like German artist Hans Bellmer’s erotic dolls. The models wore shoes with vertiginous metal heels, including one pair—the Siamese—that was actually fused together.
Louboutin’s signature red soles proved to be a brilliant marketing device, at once eye-catching and uniquely Louboutin. They made a statement about social status and sexual allure, telegraphing to the world that the wearer was rich, sexy, and possibly even ovulating. What other shoe designer could make you think of both Louis XIV and a fertile baboon?
Louboutin’s shoes became increasingly taller, decorated with studs, fur, fabric, and glitter. They were magical, beautiful, ugly, and weird, but it took the fashion genius Alexander McQueen to make the highest, most bizarre-looking shoes since Gene Simmons debuted his dragon-inspired, silver-scaled demon boots for KISS’s 1976 Destroyer tour. While McQueen’s booties didn’t have metal teeth embellishing the toe, they did have twelve-inch crustacean claws. The Armadillo booties were part of his spring 2010 collection, Plato’s Atlantis, which represented his interpretation of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In this case, however, the models, in reptilian silk-screened prints, appeared to be de-evolving back into the sea. Four months later, McQueen, who’d struggled with drugs and depression, committed suicide. The Armadillo shoes, however, live on in legend and in Lady Gaga’s video for her single “Bad Romance.”
I began to notice that the Cult of the High Heel, especially the high-heeled sandal, required certain time-consuming rituals, such as regular pedicures. I’ve always been wary of nail salons for fear of picking up a nail fungus. Back in the days when I thought I might enjoy getting pedicures, I purchased my own personal utensil box, but now it’s so old it’s probably the most unsanitary thing in the salon. My sister Nancy loves getting pedicures and thinks it’s the most relaxing experience. When I go to the nail salon, only in the summer and under great duress, I watch other women lean back in ecstasy while someone pounds their lower legs, pulls their toes, and pummels their heels. And that’s just the massage part. Before that, you have to endure scrubbing, scraping, cutting, clipping, and the confusing task of “picking a color.” Even little girls know the lingo. “I want Essie’s Turquoise and Caicos mixed with Opi’s Ski Teal We Drop,” they’ll say, while I’ll mumble, “Just something natural.” The nail technicians always looked disappointed. “Don’t you want something exciting, like Essie’s Russian Roulette?” they’ll ask. “It’s a very nice red.” But I don’t want red, and if I did, I could buy Louboutin’s Rouge, which is inspired by the red on the soles of his shoes. The seven-inch “stiletto” cap is modeled after the heel of his Ballerina Ultima shoe, and if they ever do Basic Instinct 3, I have the perfect weapon for Sharon Stone.
In my limited nail salon experience, I’ve noticed that women who are obsessed with pedicures tend to have ugly feet because they’re usually obsessed with high heels. If worn often enough, heels can cause unsightly bunions, corns, calluses, hyperextended joints, big toes that mimic the pointy shape of a stiletto, and “pump bump,” a bony enlargement on the back of the heel. (They can also cause back pain and osteoarthritis, but I’m focusing on the visuals.) What’s the point of wearing high heels to look sexy if your feet are anything but? You can attempt to disguise the problem by wearing something dark and dramatic, like Essie’s Devil’s Advocate, but as Al Pacino, who played Satan in that movie, said, “HAHAHA!”
Over the past decade, enterprising podiatrists have come up with ways to correct ugly feet, which not only have to support the full weight of your body but have to look beautiful doing it. These various methods have been called the Foot Face-Lift or Cinderella Surgery, which is a misnomer because Cinderella fit into the glass slipper. In the Brothers Grimm version, it was the Ugly Stepsisters who couldn’t squeeze into the shoe, so one cut off her toe, the other her heel. The prince was not fooled. But in this new blend of medicine and fable, anyone can have “designer feet for designer shoes.” There’s aesthetic toe shortening and toe lengthening for what one podiatrist has called the Perfect 10, fat suctioning for “toebesity,” and injectable fillers to plump up the bottoms of the feet to make walking on them less painful. If all else fails, there are always painkillers, including the nerve blocker Marcaine.
Or you could just wear comfortable, well-fitting shoes. I once interviewed a foot model for a story that had nothing to do with feet. It was about how real estate prices were pushing creative young people out of Manhattan and into places they didn’t want to go, like Brooklyn. (At the time, this was considered tragic.) When I met the model, she was sitting with her legs up, her feet covered in a thick moisturizer and swaddled in layers of Saran Wrap. When I asked her what she thought of her new neighborhood, she said she really didn’t know because she never walked around it. At some point during the interview, she pulled off the plastic, wiped off the moisturizer, and showed me her feet. They were beautiful. A Perfect 10.
“On the rare occasions when you do walk,” I asked, “what kind of shoes do you wear?”
“Sneakers with thick socks,” she said.
“Even at night.”
“Even at night.”
I remember thinking, There’s a lesson to be learned here.
And then I promptly forgot it.
A few years ago, I was asked to do a story on Gucci, which brought up my conflicted feelings about Tom Ford, who was now back in the fashion business, though not at Gucci. Still, it was hard to escape Ford’s influence on the “Gucci woman” as someone whose feet were molded onto stilettos. I’d been invited to attend the Gucci Women in Cinema Awards in Venice, a city famous for its exaggerated footwear. In the early sixteenth century, noblewomen wore “chopines,” which were extremely high platforms that could be anywhere from five to nine inches off the ground. (The Correr Museum, in St. Mark’s Square, has a twenty-inch pair.) Chopines, which were kept hidden under a woman’s skirt, highlighted a woman’s wealth, as well as her sumptuous clothing. Though she rarely left her palazzo, when she did venture out for a formal event, she often needed servants to help her navigate. Walking was even more difficult for the officially sanctioned courtesans, who had access to the nobility and were expected to dress like upper-class women, including wearing chopines.
Whenever I think of courtesans, I can’t help thinking of the couture collector, society hostess, and inveterate partygoer Nan Kempner, whom I’d met in Venice many years ago. At one point, the conversation turned to the limited choices afforded to Venetian women: courtesan or nun. She immediately said that she’d be a courtesan. “Think of the sex. The fun!” Thinking of the chopines, I opted for nun.
The second time I ran into Kempner, I was recovering from a bad knee injury after a gang of teenagers assaulted me in Central Park. En rou
te to Venice, our plane crash-landed in Brussels, and I had to slide down the emergency chute in my knee brace. Several hours later, badly shaken and without our luggage, Lee and I checked into our hotel and immediately bumped into Kempner. Ignoring our disheveled state, she got straight to the point. “Are you free for dinner?” she asked. I explained that we’d just been in a plane crash.
“Well, that’s all in the past,” she said.
“Actually, it was only four hours ago.”
“Shall we say eightish?”
The only shoes I brought with me were sturdy Mephisto boots and a pair of velvet flats. Striding confidently to the restaurant in a pair of leopard stockings and four-inch Manolo Blahniks, Kempner, who was then sixty-eight and suffering from emphysema, looked down at my flats and said, “They’re so . . . sensible.” I explained about my knee injury. Not to be outdone, Kempner said that she’d recently broken her hip trying to get into a pair of John Galliano pants. “I just fell over,” she said, “and crack!” She picked up the pace, and we were practically running down the cobblestone streets to the restaurant. She was way ahead of me, not only in speed but also in her ability to make her feet obey the punitive rules of fashion.
The World of Gucci has its rules, and I broke a big one. Nobody told me the Gucci event was black-tie. I’d packed a pair of black silk pants and a dressy blouse, which I trusted would be appropriate, but Lee didn’t pack a tuxedo, because he routinely doesn’t travel with one. “At least I have my Gucci wedding loafers,” he said.
Finally, he had another “special event” worthy of them, and he thought the Gucci people would be impressed.
They were not. Our relatively informal attire created a minor catastrophe for the young Gucci PR woman who was assigned to look after me. I’d been seated at a prime table next to actress Evan Rachel Wood, the face of Gucci’s perfume Guilty. As it turned out, someone switched the place cards, so I was actually next to Wood’s makeup artist, who explained in great detail how she created Evan’s various “looks,” including her current one, with its focus on a “smoky eye.” All Wood wanted to do was meet Madonna, whose face appeared to be in soft focus, as if shrouded in a mist of Gucci perfume. Across from me was James Franco’s manager, who announced that Franco, the face of Gucci Pour Homme, wanted to star in a movie about Robert Mapplethorpe and had I ever heard of the photographer?
Really, I could have worn sneakers and a potato sack and no one would have noticed, but at the time it was a Fashion Emergency.
We were at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection when we received the first of a steady stream of e-mails from the Gucci PR woman. She needed my husband’s suit size. We were inside the Church of Santa Maria della Salute when my cell phone rang. She wanted to know what I was wearing. I told her. Long pause. “Do you have jewelry?” she asked. Ultimately, I was allowed to wear my own clothes, but the PR woman sent Lee to the San Marco store, where he was fitted into a black suit he had to return the next morning. The suit broadened his shoulders, sucked in his waist, and lengthened his legs. It was like full-length Spanx. I couldn’t believe how good he looked. Neither could he. “What about your shoes?” the PR woman wanted to know. He told her the whole Gucci wedding saga while she checked her e-mail. “They’re vintage,” I added.
I’d packed a pair of four-year-old Louboutin kitten heels that I’d purchased at the Madison Avenue boutique at great cost to my wallet and pride. To ask for anything but the highest heel is to invoke pitying looks from other customers, who know you are not “one of them” and by right shouldn’t be allowed in the store. I was happy that at least the salesman allowed me to buy the shoes and didn’t tell me they were “training heels” for little girls with big feet. Though I used to love them, next to the Gucci Amazons in stilettos, I felt like Tiny Alice.
With the party only a few hours away, I tried on my outfit and hated the way the pants looked with my unfashionably low heels. I needed a new pair and told Lee I was off to do more sightseeing. Taking the hotel’s water taxi from the Giudecca to St. Mark’s Square, I began a desperate search for moderate two-inch heels. I believed that extra inch would make all the difference. I couldn’t go back into Gucci because I’d already spurned their offer to dress me, so after running from store to store, I wound up in Fendi. I bought the lowest heel I could find—nearly four inches. “Not high at all,” said the twentysomething saleswoman. An American tourist, who was also shopping for shoes, looked down at my heels and said, “I love those! I wish I could buy them, but I wouldn’t be able to walk.”
“You just have to practice,” I said. “Then it’s easy.” The shoe demon had possessed me. Not only was I buying shoes I couldn’t walk in, but I was also lying to total strangers about it.
With all the excitement of wearing his new suit, I hoped Lee wouldn’t notice my new shoes, but of course he did because I suddenly grew four inches taller, which made me six feet two.
“What do you have on your feet?” he asked.
“Shoes.”
“I know they’re shoes. But they look new. You didn’t just buy them, did you?”
I couldn’t lie twice, so I told him the truth.
“You’re not going to be able to walk in those things,” he said.
“You sound like a broken record.”
“Remember Carolyne the Rat.”
“Carolyne the Rat had pointy toes,” I explained. “These are peep-toe.”
“You’re still not going to be able to walk in them.”
All I needed to do was walk from my hotel to the party at the Cipriani, which is the equivalent of two New York City blocks. If Venetian courtesans could walk the cobbled streets in chopines, I could manage that.
I couldn’t. It was torture.
Up ahead, I saw Salma Hayek climbing out of a Gucci speedboat. Her husband, François Pinault owns the company that owns Gucci. I saw Gucci’s former designer, Frida Giannini. I saw Robin Wright. I saw Jessica Chastain. I saw Madonna. They were all extremely tall, even Selma Hayek, who in the real world is extremely short, but this wasn’t the real world. It was the World of the Few, the Happy Few, the Band of High-Heeled Sisters, and I was determined to be in their company, even if my feet revolted, even if I limped and hobbled, even if I didn’t reach my goal . . . until St. Crispin’s Day!
15
A Pain in the Heel
When Emily was pregnant, my mother wanted to give her my baby shoes. She’d been keeping them for the right occasion and this seemed as good as any. “But they’re mine,” I said. My mother couldn’t understand why I’d want my baby shoes when I was no longer a baby, unless of course I was having a baby. At fifty-one.
I was amazed my mother had even kept the shoes. She’d always hated clutter and as she grew older, she’d toss out anything she could lift without getting a hernia. “What happened to Emily’s baby shoes?” I asked. “Why does she need mine?”
“I think I threw hers out,” she admitted. “Anyway, all baby shoes look alike.”
I explained that for sentimental reasons, I wanted to keep them. I took my first steps in them. I learned how to walk in them. They started me on the journey that led me to where I am now.
“And where is that?” my mother asked.
“In New York, as a writer.”
“Too bad the shoes didn’t lead you to Oprah. You would have been good on that show.”
Since I’d grown up across the street from Jay Leno, my mother had totally unrealistic expectations about celebrity. She thought being famous was easy and failed to understand why I’d yet to achieve that goal, especially since I lived in New York, where celebrities were a dime a dozen.
“Maybe if you’d cast my baby shoes in bronze I could have clobbered someone in the head with them,” I said, “and then I’d be known as the Baby Shoe Killer.”
“That’s not even funny,” my mother said. “I bet you haven’t thought of your baby shoes in ye
ars.”
Actually, I’d thought of them just the other day. I was at the nail salon for my semiannual torture session, when the technician started to shave the corn on my baby toe. “Wait,” I nearly screamed. “It used to be an extra toe!”
“Oh, that means good luck,” she said. I was so deeply touched I agreed to have the Special Spa Pedicure, which cost an extra $40 and involved more pummeling and pounding than any person could possibly endure.
As for my baby shoes, I was fairly sure my sister didn’t even want them. I’d seen her only once during her pregnancy, when I’d invited her to the Broadway rock musical Rent. She looked beautiful that night, fresh and glowing and happy. Though she’d purposely kept her distance from me, perhaps fearing that if I didn’t have a baby, she might not be able to have one either, I was thrilled she was pregnant and hoped it would signal a new beginning. But even today, I can’t listen to the show’s opening number, “Seasons of Love,” without feeling unbearably sad. Jonathan Larson, Rent’s thirty-five-year-old creator, died suddenly on the day of the first preview. The song addresses the fleeting nature of time, reducing a year to “five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.”
When Emily gave birth to an adorable little girl, I was overjoyed. I imagined the two of us walking the baby in Central Park. I imagined taking my niece to the theater, museums, and the ballet, showing her the New York I’d grown to love. Maybe I’d even write the children’s cat book my mother was always pestering me about. I’d name the main cat after my niece, who would get involved in all sorts of magical adventures. But even though my sister and I live twelve blocks apart, I rarely had the opportunity to see the new baby. I’d try to set up specific times, but they were never convenient. When I did arrange a date, Emily would tell me to call before I came. I’d call and the baby was sleeping. I’d call again and receive the same or a different response, but either way, the message was that if I wanted to see my niece, I had to play by my sister’s rules, which to me were increasingly mystifying.
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