When did men stop wearing high heels?
qz.com
qz.com
http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/86712900
I had a whole collection of hippie outfits back in the day. My mom thought I was gay, but I just liked colorful clothing. Back then, you were straight or you were weird - where "straight" meant "didn't do drugs"... I was proud to be weird!
I got my hippie nickname from the back of an old radio I saw at a garage sale:
Equipped with Truetone Stratoscope
Eliminates aerial and ground
Here's a photo from five years later when I took my mom flying:
http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/120224799
This was more of my disco phase, I suppose. I have very fond memories of the young lady who made the flying wings necklace for me! :-) And I still had some kind of eye for color - I didn't notice until a couple of years ago that I'd totally color-coordinated my clothes with the airplane!
I am digging those trousers, dude.
Looks like you had some kind of primitive instagram equipment too. Far out.
Feel free to wear whatever you want, but when it comes to footwear, some things are best avoided if you want to stay in good working order.
"Sunday 22 January 1660 To church in the afternoon to Mr. Herring, where a lazy poor sermon. And so home with Mrs. Turner and sitting with her a while we went to my father’s where we supt very merry, and so home. This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes, which I have bought yesterday of Mr. Wotton."
"Attractive women wearing skirts sat in a park mid-day. At precisely noon, they all lit cigarettes. Press, who had been told by Bernays to watch for something interesting, snapped pictures.. cigarette companies now doubled their consumer base"
(I don't know the proper name for it, but the idea of one object as part of your person that draws attention, kind of like how a good photograph needs a focal point that naturally draws the eyes)
Guess who Bernays' uncle was. Yeah.
Evening dress at Cannes is black tie. Women's formal shoes tend to be heels. Rhinestone flats really are not black tie appropriate.
I think a sensible analogy, for men, is straight tie vs. bowtie. You're asking for trouble if you forego the bowtie.
Likewise, I think a man wearing heels will also be turned away.
If folks have a problem with this, then I can think of no better crowd to dictate what is appropriate dress than the Hollywood elite, so I suspect this will resolve itself without much ado.
Of course, the last thing I need is to wear high heels myself.
Anyway, as a mid-20s straight man who likes wearing 5" stilettos, finding out the history of when and why men did and didn't do the same is interesting to me. As it is, the only time I feel comfortable wearing them out is during the Folsom Street Fair (and maybe Pride too but I feel that doing so might encourage assumptions of my being gay among viewers/my friends, which is not necessary bad, but just not a view of myself that I particular want to promote, as it is incorrect.)
Finally, the two men who mentioned attempting to walk in them and failing make me somewhat disappointed; whether or not they expect women to wear heels, they probably generally enjoy it when they see a woman in heels and could get a much better appreciation for her efforts (especially if she's still out after an 8 hour day wearing them.)
Edit: apparently it's not nuked off page 1. Could have sworn it was.
Not to be judgmental, just out of honest intellectual curiosity, can you explain the appeal? Because I totally don't get it.
That's the appeal for me. Everyone is different, though.
I'm sorry, but that makes very little sense. If you want to look nice then you need to go by what society judges as nice and society does not consider a man with heels to "look nice".
Plus, with the right body type and shoes, you too could look quite nice in heels. Or full drag. Except I'm not into that but you are free to do as you like.
Edit: I haven't been able to post for an hour so I have nowhere else to put this: sorry Silverstorm I'm 6'3". Doesn't mean I don't like being taller though.
Anyway one recent popular menswear designer, Rick Owens, wears heels: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg0ahygW5j1qazwkm.jpg
Why?
You've been down-voted, probably because this assertion seems somewhere between weird and offensive to most people here, but I'm genuinely curious as to why you believe it.
This is particularly relevant to HN because most of the people here are interested in innovation, and innovation comes from precisely deviating from the standards of society. As Henry Ford famously remarked, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
This is the reception that innovators of all kinds get, and currently men's dress is incredibly restricted. We aren't quite stuck in Victorian days, but the diminishment of acceptable fashion choice for men in the past 200 years has been huge. In 1800 a man could still wear colourful clothing, jewelry, and makeup. Fifty years later, a man could wear clothes that would shock no-one if seen on the street today, and nothing else.
I don't quite buy "the Enlightenment" as the whole answer, or even part of the answer, but there is no doubt that cultural shifts around that time had the effect of putting all men in uniform clothing. Think about that for a minute: women are allowed to wear almost anything today. Men are given a tiny number of acceptable choices, and no one much minds. I'm considered extravagant because I sometimes wear a bright red blazer to the theatre, which would be permitted if I were gay, but when I show up with my girlfriend it gets me insulted.
200 years ago men who were a hell of a lot more manly than me wore far more extravagant clothing and no one batted an eye (except maybe a few women who thought they were particularly attractive dressed like that.)
This is a lousy situation for straight men in the modern world: we deserve to be more than uniformed ciphers in the public eye, and rejecting society's judgement of what looks nice is a necessary step to take, just as rejecting society's judgement of what suitable entertainment is was necessary to the radio and film industry, rejecting society's judgement of what suitable travel technology is was necessary to the automobile and aircraft industry was, and so on. And you better believe that conservatives were frequently strongly against those innovations as well.
Innovation is driven by people with the courage to reject society's judgement and replace it with their own, and we should honour that courage, not denigrate it.
I have come to believe it because I have come to realize that it is the only notion of "nice" that has real utility.
I only wish somebody had explained that to me earlier in life. I spent too much of my youth disadvantaging myself socially by failing to prioritize how I present myself to others.
Utility means that something produces (directly or indirectly) satisfaction for the person making the decision. Doing what society judges as nice has instrumental utility, in that it can help you get better responses from society, which either can produce utility for you directly or help get others to do things which produce utility for you.
Doing what pleases yourself -- including aesthetically as in favoring what "looks nice" to you -- has direct and immediate utility, however.
Both are "real" utility. Which is greater utility will vary considerably.
I think that anyone who actually stops to consider this, actually weighs how their dress effects how the rest of society interacts with them, will arrive on the same conclusion (unless they have some serious issues to work out). If cloth honestly has more of an effect on you how other people treat you, you've probably got a disorder.
Which is a testament to its power, since a valid reason broke your brain's entire sense of "reasonable." You don't get it because you can't get it, you simply don't have the cognitive capacity for the idea, or else you would have allowed for it to make some sense, even if it didn't appeal to you.
What's powerful about walking on your feet's balls and toes and abusing your body ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-heeled_footwear#Health_eff... ) ?
Note that I'm not saying that wearing high heels is a good idea.
Health effects are a different issue, and you aren't going to learn feeling from Wikipedia, or intellectually at all. It is experiential.
"Because I enjoy the sensations it provides" is often the only analysis we can provide for our tastes. Sometimes we can break it down further, and people with unusual tastes are frequently pressed (politely or not) to "explain" their tastes.
This is understandable--we're genuinely curious about tastes that differ from our own--but it's also a bit myopic, because we so rarely turn the same unanswerable attitude on our own tastes. Simply because something is common does not make it immune to analysis, and I strongly encourage anyone who wants to ask this kind of question to give a preamble for their own taste in similar matters.
So if you're straight and want to ask a gay man, "What is it about the male body that turns you on?" first say, "The thing that makes women attractive to me is..." I have no idea how to answer this: I'm boringly straight and just find the female body inherently attractive. I can appreciate male beauty the way I can appreciate a beautiful building, but there's simply no attraction. I've come to accept that my gay friends are just wired differently from me.
I'm not saying "all differences of taste are unanalyzable" but that our legitimate curiousity about other people's tastes should be an opportunity to analyze our own.
An awful lot of attraction and esthetics is cultural, and the rest of it is personal.
Grapefruit I get. Being attracted to men I get (despite the fact that I'm straight). But I don't get stilettos because they just look like they'd be so damn uncomfortable. The only reason I can see to wear them at all is to conform to some societal norm.
If I met a straight woman who claimed to enjoy wearing neck ties I would be equally nonplussed.
I could be wrong, but if your parent is already 6'2" the heels put him at 6'7"...
When people choose to do/wear those things because they like them, or choose to have extensive piercings or tattoos, etc., more power to them.
In other words, the problem for me is with social expectations that discriminate against people who don’t put extensive money, time, discomfort, and sometimes injury on the line to look the way society expects.
I'm asking because I feel you and I live in a different reality. The concept of gender roles and its restrictions on free personal choice is, as far as I know, completely accepted by the mainstream, and while I'm sure there are dissenters, the idea that they are the dominant opinion is baffling to me.
HuffPost, not exactly a fringe publication, has had a dozen or so posts on it the past week alone: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/gender-roles/
This is not to say gender roles or other social expectations are dead - of course not, they're extremely powerful. But I certainly don't agree that it's taboo to point it out.
[0] http://feministcurrent.com/9226/johns-are-now-an-oppressed-s...
Feminists who point out objectification and the expectation of sexual access are slapped with the label "SWERFs" (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminists). Meghan Murphy writes quite a lot about it so see her other pieces.
It's in Portuguese, but essentially it's about kids coming home and saying that their school colleagues had to them that (1) her mother was too old, (2) that they aren't her "real" parents (she's obviously adopted), and (3) that he shouldn't have two dads, and it ends up with them hugging each other.
When Coke, one of the more important symbols of the dominant system, has an ad about social expectations and people defying them, it's kind of hard to argue that it's not a well accepted concept!
I cannot remember the specific details, or even pointedly vague ones, but she prefers heels with a stiff platform base of right around an inch, and an actual heel height of right around 3-inches or so. No pointy toes, just the curved ones. This is the style she wears; only the color changes.
She loves other styles, but doesn't wear them due to the pain involved. She has lots of 'bootie' styles with lower heels, and plenty of sharp-looking standard Oxford styles with a small heel.
Her feet aren't beat up and she doesn't complain about pain unless she's trying to con me into a foot rub.
I can see what she's talking about. The lowish heel doesn't force the toes into a wedge which isn't there to begin with due to the non-pointy nature of the front of the shoes she wears, and the firm platform base means that every part of her leg from the knees down aren't fighting to keep themselves aligned on a platform that can be fairly flexible.
It is not necessary to proclaim that you are straight to strangers, and making this kind of disclaimer before talking about clothes or hair or disco, or anything else merely serves to perpetuate stereotypes.
I can tell you that I take my children to Toronto Pride every year. Is it necessary for me to get into my sexuality?
:-)
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/03/26/395391623/...
It's a bit sad that in western culture there's such a strong bias between sexes in clothing, were each sex has his own set of "acceptable" uniforms. With feminism women gained much more freedom in that regard, but men don't have much choice.
It's not unthinkable that while men tend not to care, there are men that also like pretty/colorful/different things, irregardless of their sexual preferences, but simply abstain to express due to social pressure.
[1]: http://www.timothy-judge.com/Height%20paper--JAP%20published...
I'm sure clean-looking people are better regarded as well, does that make regular bathing dishonest?
More information on the Wallace Collection website: http://www.museumnetworkuk.org/portraits/artworks/wallace/im...
(I'm assuming you were looking for shoe add-ons)
There's also the hidden inner platform for when you already maxed out the acceptable visible heel: http://www.scarpeconrialzo.it/it/information/struttura-delle...