On the rocks

Chloé's latest ad campaign, as seen on a huge billboard in Happy Valley which I passed on the bus this morning, shows two waiflike models walking across some rocks in vertiginous heels (heels not included in picture below, but those are some rocks). I'm not necessarily known for my appropriate footwear, and I love wearing heels, for my own, (probably) highly suspect, reasons; but this surely illustrates the utter departure from practicality of current women's footwear. Go into any shoe shop and you'll notice that heels have got dramatically higher (a vacuous video by a "high heels expert" on the Guardian website purports to show you how to walk in heels, but I can save you the burden of watching it: it does nothing of the sort), viz. the six-inch heels by Louboutin that various celebrity no-marks have been sporting. Sometimes it seems as though this is all part of a vast conspiracy; and really it's akin to the binding which Chinese women used to undergo to make their feet look smaller.


I once went on a hike in the fjords of Norway, south of Stavanger (a pretty, and pretty dull, town where I walked disconsolately round the supermarket poking at the whale meat, and where I learned that rural Norwegians shoot feral cats for sport). For once I was sensibly shod, but I remember watching a woman clambering across Pulpit Rock (which was by no means small and was covered in ice) in heels. She was clearly blazing a trail for just this sort of nonsense.