The heels women love

There’s something about women and shoes that men just don’t get, and that women find difficult to explain. Samir Singh is the only footwear designer I know — if you discount the Chinese shoe makers of Kolkata, and that’s almost an extinct breed anyway — and according to him, a good pair of shoes can change a woman’s personality. While that explains their changeling personas, it still doesn’t tell us why women obsess about shoes (and bags — but let’s save that for another time) to the point where they can buy hundreds, no, thousands of pairs, even at the risk of their relationships and bankruptcy. Imelda Marcos wasn’t the only famous consumer of every known style and colour: these days, every Bollywood starlet lists shopping for shoes as a favourite pastime (for men it’s a chore), and author Danielle Steele owns 6,000 pairs, many of which are Christian Louboutins.

Steele bought 80 of those on just one day from a single Christian Louboutin store: her royalties from her book sales allow for these indulgences, but as Indians are finding out at the first Christian Louboutin store at New Delhi’s DLF Emporio, such extravagance comes at a cost. These are shoes that have been described as “pieces of art” by television diva Oprah Winfrey, whose size of shoe collection might be a mystery, but even she might baulk at the Christian Louboutin stiletto heel of 4.72 inches (and higher).

The stiletto was apparently invented by Roger Vivier, and something that challenges every known notion of ergonomics and gravity became so popular that women will suffer discomfort to stand taller in these teetering heels. 

French footwear designer Christian Louboutin apprenticed with Vivier, and the stiletto became a standard feature of his styling, but it is also his beading — an ode to Egypt and India, where he travelled when young — that forms part of his signature jewelled, brocaded straps.

If Louboutin stilettos are sharp enough to damage wooden floors, it’s a mystery why London-based Malaysian footwear designer Jimmy Choo is so popular when there isn’t any woman I know who claims to buy his shoes for comfort. Apparently, you buy Choos for their blingy, eye-catching designs and instant recognisability, and Jimmy Choo sales are such huge events that store managers have to deploy extra security on these occasions. I was in Abu Dhabi when a Choo sale in Dubai was reported as page-one news in the local papers.

Manolo Blahnik became footwear royalty when fashion editor Diana Vreeland famously told him to design only shoes even as he was trying to break into the fashion world. His big break was character Carrie Bradshaw in the television series Sex and the City who made the edgier, dressier Blahniks hip and sexy. It has also made the towering stilettos so popular in Japan, there are hundreds of Blahnik stores in the country.

That’s, of course, not counting the Chanels and Guccis and every fashion brand worth its name that also do women’s shoes. And yet, even when women can buy branded shoes that cost them from a few thousand rupees to a few lakh, you’ll find them also bargaining for homemade, homegrown rip-offs of their Louboutins and Choos as they try on endless pairs at hole-in-the-wall dives looking for the next footwear star.

Samir Singh must be hoping for some of that stardust. As someone who became an instant celebrity for designing the world’s first convertible shoe (a boot that transforms into a pair of stilettos), his label Jakaal has been attempting to find a place in an increasingly shoe-obsessed nation, though his ambitions are global. 

Currently based in the capital, he hopes to find franchise partners in the coming years that will enable him to open 35 stores in locations across the world. More importantly, he wants to design an iconic pair of heels every three months. His shoes are made in the same Italian factories where some of the best branded pieces are hand-manufactured, so it isn’t quality as much as the buzz in the market that will dictate whether Singh’s unusual styling will pull the rug from under Louboutin’s distinctive red lacquer soles.

The author is a Delhi-based writer and curator