Why Men Need to Start Wearing Heels.. Again

As an LGBTQ+ woman, I have been blessed with the kinship of men who know style from gender and objects from self. Since a child, the glitz and glamour of drag: the exuberance, the freedom from dated conceits of moralizing the masculine being as masculine does - the height - it all struck me as an attired display of true culture, true freedom. True fashion. “Isn’t it glorious!”, watchers would think, sitting pretty at brunch with a mimosa in one hand and a cell phone camera in another, photographing queens and their undressed, though heel-wearing, backup dancers. Oh! The shoes! Yes, of course, the wigs, the outfits, the dance. But, oh. Oh! The shoes!

Higher than heaven itself and well balanced. The elongation of a calf as graciously elegant and eye-soothing as paint slowly waterfalling from a tap. The way the body could sway with grandeur and self-assuredness in the same vein of confidence and establishment of a boundary between us two. It wasn’t about the performance at all, not really. It was about the body. The attention it was given by the owner’s feet and legs as they carried them with strutting bliss across my vision. There was no longer man or woman, no longer fashion nor style. There was nothing but a body and the way it was meant to be touted.

Experiences like this, full of gayness and cross-dressing, are so immensely satisfying to endear oneself too that it becomes easy to forget whatever the heel was made for. Seeing queens wear them for entertainment purposes, for an aesthetic, it’s easy to think that heels are a feminine-only covet, as if they weren’t invented for men. Argue the femininely-aligned are more fit to endure the royalty of taking up four more inches of air and earth and sky in cherry red somethings or open-toed whatsitsname than the rest, but it is a historically failing position.

Stepping into the fashion time machine, welcome to Persia, circa the 15th century. Keeping in mind that women were not allowed to be soldiers, the first propagation of heels was invented to assist soldiers in reaching the stirrups of their horses and keeping their feet secure in travel and battle. Migrants of Persia that traveled westward to Europe ignited the cloud-high fascination. Fast forward 200 years to the 1670s, France’s King Louis XIV, ever known for his lean toward grandeur and attention to the beauty of the bodily self, would introduce the first glimpse at a modern-day Louboutin. His red heels with red soles carried him wistfully around the French court, with a grace and determination that afforded him superiority, indignation, and exuded confidence. From here forward, European royalty jumped at the chance to become associated with power and prowess, perhaps even with the rigor and physical and moral strength of a soldier. And somewhere in this 200-year gap for height and power, female Venetian prostitutes and maids brought them into their employ, allowing them status in height and the needed length of their dress to cover their stilts.

Since then, we’ve come to know heels as the definition of princesses; take Cinderella’s glass slipper (if it fit perfectly, why did it fall off?). Or the Grimm’s tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Look at any runway, any bridal magazine, any woman going to a job interview. Heels have become a misnomer to womanhood. The heel is no longer a tool, a machinery, a sign of dignity. Instead, it is a sign of sexuality and femininity.

This is not to say that women’s heel-wearing is anything less than awe-strikingly beautiful and audibly, physically, powerful. No, this is to say that the high heel, the pursuit of strength and elongation, the pursuit of beauty and grace – it is a genderless, limitless, soul-house in the sky. So why shouldn’t men, cis-gendered, straight, men, along with their LGBTQ+ brothers, sisters, and thems, feel that silky and delicious move of their physique as it stamps the ground, too?

Issues of toxic masculinity and hundreds of years of female oppression just momentarily set aside to bubble, toil, and trouble, men, need to start wearing heels for reasons beyond breaking down the ick-worthy and antiquated gender binary or reclaiming bodies with grace over brazenness. For one, shoes have always been one of the foremost vital ways of stylistic and identity explorative self-expression. Shoes have brought people into war and gotten them out. Shoes have been decorated in the architecture of temples of worship. Shoes have been signs of class and class structure, indications of economic landscapes, bespoken for centuries for the sake of art. The heel has the power to turn a same-label-black-suit into a work of integrity, a work of the self, the body as a canvas. Equally, heels do not mean stilettos. They can be thick or pencil-thin, high or low, even round or square. Of all the kinds of garmentry, there are for feet, the heel is a product of the self, not a product in and of itself. It has the power to modify the wearer and bring them ever closer to achieving true self-proclamation.

It is time to defeminize fashion and defeminize the heel. Shoes, shirts, pants, skirts – simply objects we have made for our pleasure, for our utility, for our liking. Why not step back in time for a moment? Why not reclaim a symbol of beauty? If to object one’s self from adornment is to attempt to flee femininity, then the world is set to be too dull of a place for my liking.