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The first high heel ever was a piece of military footwear.
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People in West Asia had been tremendous horse riders,
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and that's how they fought, they rode in the saddle and they stood up
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to shoot their bows and that meant you need a heel to keep
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you in the stirrups, nice and stable.
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The Shah of Persia, he's called Abbas the First,
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he sends off some emissaries into Europe and they turn up
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wearing high heels and everyone goes...
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...so suddenly this military clothing becomes adopted in Europe.
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But it's a little bit later on, in the early 1600s, that we start
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to see heels coming in, and it starts with the blokes,
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it's for being manly and butch. But what happens quite quickly
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is women start to emulate male fashion, and part of that
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is they start wearing men's shoes. The real big moment is when Louis XIV
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of France starts wearing heels, because he's quite a small man,
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and he famously has red heels - that Louboutin mirrored
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later on in the 20th Century.
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Suddenly everyone at the court is wearing heels.
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Heels go through a bit of an up and down history
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and the 1700s, philosophers are talking about the rationalism of men,
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by contrast, women are said to be emotional and sentimental
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and can't be trusted to do important things like think.
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And so men are being advised to wear rational shoes
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and high heels are not rational.
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The 1860s, this is when women's heels start to become sexy.
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We have photography, a brand new technology,
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and quite often in pornography of this period,
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you're seeing women still wearing their boots,
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their shoes with the heels on, so it becomes erotic.
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Hollywood had a huge influence on the rise of heels as the symbol
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of sexiness. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe famously quoted,
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I can't think of the exact words but she said you know...
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“we owe the man who invented high heels so much...”
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...she was speaking on behalf of women. For Monroe, who was about
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glamour and beauty and sexiness, she felt that that was an asset.
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People can tell whether women are wearing high heels without actually
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seeing their feet, so it is that posture, change in the gait.
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But a more recent study has shown that actually it's changing the shape
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of the spine that is actually the attractive thing.
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We looked at all the research on high heels and they are not healthy,
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there was increased risk of musculoskeletal conditions,
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bunions and pain.
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I think they're too iconic and too much a part of aesthetics and imagery
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and history and power and sex to ever go away,
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and I think they'll always be there.
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I'd rather go through quite a lot of pain and wear them and look nice,
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and suffer for it, I think.
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I'm crazy about fashion, I think we all are.
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And I think any smart woman would go on wearing them,
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irrespective of what the consequences are.
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