Glittering space aliens of the world unite and stand up! If you can…

This is shaping up to be the season of blissfully nonsensical shoes. Already the height of heels on the high-street has skyrocketed. Shapes are taken to their extremities; toes are snub-nosed, height bolstered by platforms complimenting extraordinary structured heels. Footwear is fantastical but short on whimsy. Buckles, studs and bold prints are hard edged and provocative, rather than playful.

(Or, as one fashion insider said, “Urgh, they look like ugly  cows’ faces!”)

The Crown Prince of fantasy footwear this season is Alexander McQueen, who stole the show at Paris Fashion Week with shoes resembling the sort half-discovered lifeforms that might lurk between the rocks of a 1950 sci-fi planet. These are shoes that have followed an alternative theory of evolution. Heels like stalactites or columns of coral, they look like extraordinary organic forms. At the same time, for the models propped up 10 inches of spacerock these shoes aren’t so much footwear, as they are feats of engineering. They are extraordinary and fabulous creations, not designed for walking any further than the length of a catwalk. In space there is no night-bus home. 

But it’s difficult not to feel uneasy about this trend towards ultra-high shoes. Louboutin started it off with his 8-inch stiletto last autumn and shoe trends continue towards the extreme. There are even reports of plastic surgeons offering procedures to help high-heel wearers cope with their footwear and life-long wearers often end up needed orthopaedic surgery.

The other day I found myself running barefoot on the dirty, dampish streets of South London. A man held the bus for me as I careered towards the stop laddering my tights on the pavement. In one hand I had my shoes, heels out, wielding them madly like an ancient warrior running into battle. I was late for a Feminist Meeting.

The indignities suffered over the years in the name of inappropriate footwear are too many to list and each one of them was self-inflicted. Many high-heel wearers will be able to sympathise with shoe related injury; the red-badge of courage above the ankles at the end of a night out, the pain the next day and the increased likelihood of spectacularly falling over as you teeter home.

High heels are a nightmare: they slow us down, they’re often painful, they can cause long term medical problems and they’re completely unnecessary. There are things you just can’t do in a pair of high heels and at the back of your mind you have to ask the question if they make running for a bus difficult, then how difficult would it be to run from an attacker?

At their worst they sum up all the worst ideas about women and beauty held by society.

Women are more vulnerable when they wear them. They represent the worst, most self-defeating types of vanity and conspicuous consumption. They demonstrate willingness not only to tolerate physical discomfort in order to comply with an arbitrary and regressive feminine aesthetic, but to shell out for the privilege. High heels turn women into decorative objects, but even knowing all this so many will still choose to wear them. 

As a child they are a grown-ups’ shoe, off limits except for dressing up. And for some of us that allure never quite wears off; even in adult life they are the most glamorous items in our wardrobes, because they provide instant transformation. They make you taller and they make you more elegant. When you walk down a corridor they sound brilliant and they make you look better when you’re dancing.

A bit like smoking, knowing high heels are bad doesn’t make them look  any less glamorous. And while the reality of stumbling out of the club and the agony of the walk home, is as about as glamorous as the smokers huddled outside in the drizzle you know that it was worth it, because no-one ever stole the show with a pair of Birkenstocks.