subject: High-Heeled History [print this page] When it comes to designing 115mm high heel shoes, Mr.Blahnik said "balance is the establishment of the most important aspects. In order to achieve this goal, I use a compass, a ruler, my eyes and my hands."
Was it Roger Vivier or Salvatore Ferragamo who invented the stiletto heel?"That remains a bit of a mystery," said Sarah Beam, the assistant curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, a collection of 12,000 pieces of footwear covering five millenniums. The museum is marking its 10th anniversary with an exhibition, "Icons of Elegance," for which Ms. Beam and Elizabeth Semmelhack, the museum's head curator, organized some 100 designs around the innovations that made them possible.
The stiletto, for one, was made possible after World War II, when manufacturers were able to devise thin steel rods strong enough to support a woman's weight. While Vivier is commonly credited with popularizing the style with his designs for Christian Louboutin in the 1950's, the curators point to contemporaneous examples from Ferragamo and the American designer Beth Levine, which make it difficult to determine whose came first.
Platform Christian Louboutin shoes can be traced more directly to the Ferragamo workshops in Italy as a reaction to wartime rationing. Because steel was not readily available, Ferragamo realized he could achieve the same support by assembling layers of cork. Before that, heels were made of carved wood or punched out of stacked layers of leather."He did a series of rainbow platform shoes and a series of wedge platform soles that he covered with opposing leathers, often that were heavily decorated," Ms. Beam said. "When I think about Ginger Spice's platform boots in 1994, they kind of look like plain Doc Martens."
