Christian Louboutin, the French shoe designer, was in town and about 200 of his faithful clients had come to pay homage — most of them in the designer’s skyscraper stilettos, which not only soar to more than $3,000 but have heels that top out at 160 millimeters, or a little more than 6 inches.
“I go to work in them. I go out at night in them,” said Angela Russo, 30, a Manhattan attorney who was wearing Louboutin black suede platform sandals. “I think they’re amazing, incredibly sexy and they’re comfortable. The construction is impeccable.”
Over the past decade, technical advances in materials and fabrication, combined with designers’ skills and desire to innovate, have pushed many dress shoe heels beyond the traditional 70 millimeter to 90 millimeter range in recent years. But as anyone who has broken a heel knows, the higher the elevation, the more likely it is to snap.
“The technical must-haves for designing a stiletto are a strong heel to sustain the weight of the wearer and a reinforced shank — the instep, which is the curved part of the sole — so the shoe won’t collapse,” said Elizabeth Semmelback, curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
Many give the credit for that stronger heel to ABS, or Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, a polymer developed by a U.S. government team working on synthetic rubber after World War II.
“The most important innovation in high heels is the ABS molded high heel,” said Nicholas Kirkwood, 29, a shoe designer who won the British Fashion Awards emerging star prize last year. “It’s what allows them to be really high and come in multifaceted shapes.”
It is the material used by many designers, including Mr. Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik, a pioneer in the contemporary shoe designer pantheon, although Mr. Blahnik draws the line at 115-millimeter heels. “115 is the highest heel to walk properly and comfortably,” the British-based designer said. “You have grace and femininity.”
Mr. Blahnik’s heels, which he likes to describe as “spindly,” have a central steel rod surrounded by ABS plastic and a polyurethane tip at the bottom. And to attach them firmly to the shoe, artisans in his factories position five nails, each one at a 7-degree angle and about 8 millimeters apart, a configuration that looks something like a martini glass.
A compressed-air gun is used to hammer the nails into place and, as a finishing touch, a screw is driven through the insole and into the heel, a sort of metaphorical olive.
The insoles most commonly used for Italian-made high heels are produced by Texon, a 60-year-old company, which makes a cellulose base from cotton fibers, for moisture absorption. Several other materials then are glued on it to form a kind of sandwich, with the area under the toes and ball of the foot designed to be soft and flexible while the arch and heel are made for strength. Part of that design is a stiff strip called the shankboard, which creates the arch, and a pair of spaghetti-thin steel rods that run from the heel to the ball of the foot, to help maintain the architecture of the shoe.
The front of the insole has an added layer of Latex foam for comfort.
Mr. Blahnik also adds a layer of felt, for extra cushioning, inside his shoes — “to make sure you avoid the ‘Princess and the Pea’ effect,” said George Malkemus, the president of Manolo Blahnik. “The cushioning is higher at the heel so you don’t feel the nail heads and gets thinner towards the front of the shoe because you need room for the toes.”
When it comes to the design, Mr. Blahnik said, “balance is the most important aspect of creating a 115-millimeter heel. To achieve it, I use a compass, a ruler, my eyes and my hands.” Some designers now use a CAD, or computer-assisted design, system in their work but Mr. Blahnik said he would rather do everything himself — “I am a traditionalist,” he said.
And the goal is achieved when the toe of the shoe and the tip of the heel strike the ground at the same time, with the weight evenly balanced over the shoe.
Mr. Louboutin also has hidden a microplastic platform under the ball of the foot, to give a bit of bounce and “to make the woman look good with a maximum of comfort for that type of height.”
“You measure from the top of the heel to the top of the platform inside the sole and that’s the height of the heel that you’re really walking on,” the designer said. So while his heels may look particularly high, “at the end of the day, it’s the same as a plain pump with a single sole.”
While fetish drawings from the late 19th century show very thin high heels, it wasn’t until the post-World War II era that the technological advances leading to today’s stiletto first became common.
“Stiletto,” a history of the shoe by Caroline Cox, a visiting professor in cultural history at the University of Arts in London, notes that Roger Vivier, working for Christian Dior, created the classic silhouette in 1952 — but his heels were wood. “With wood heels, you can’t go high without them breaking,” Professor Cox said in an interview.
By 1954, Mehmet Kurdash, a shoemaker with a small business in London’s East End, “figured that, if you put in an aluminum stem, you can go high without the heels breaking,” she said.
Mr. Vivier then devised the “talon aiguille,” or “needle heel,” which was reinforced with steel. And by 1956, designers at an Italian trade fair presented the basic composition used today: a central metal stem enclosed in a plastic shell.
Today, “It’s about balance, shapes and proportions,” said Mr. Kirkwood. “It has to fit the foot and different feet. It’s not just an objet d’art.”
Publication: The New York Times
Article: The Highest Heels Rely on Technology to Reach the Sky
November 17, 2009
ELIZABETH HAYT
Commentary by Kesandra:
I've always known that it took a lot to wear extremely high heels, but this is the first time I've actually realized how much it actually takes to make them!
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