rogerandsarah

<As for "cross-dressing", have you not read any of the stuff here about "free-styling"? Would you turn away the business if it came to you with cash-in-hand to buy?> No I haven't.... and yes, as it happens, if "the business" had the courage to state what the shoes were actually going to be used for, I would turn it away - in fact I already am, aren't I? No more posts from us, it's obvious we're just not seeing eye to eye here. Please respect that we have a right to our points of view, just as we respect yours. Best Wishes, Roger and Sarah.

Sorry, we disagree. If you keep chasing the point length with the heel height, you end up with a very strange shoe indeed, especially when you see it walking along the road (assuming it can, of course, at that height). Points have their own appeal, and don't need to be "balanced" by increased heel height. They can even look pretty amazing on a kitten heel, though we prefer higher. Some women get it, others don't. We're more than happy with the proportion of our shoes, thanks, but of course, some may have another opinion. Jo-I hadn't realised that this forum was also for men who wear women's shoes. Thanks for making this clear. We will of course take part in the women's forum in future - our shoes are only in women's sizes, and not intended for cross-dressing. Please forgive the error - I'm not sure why this happened, we were answering a point made by someone else originally, and ended up here! We have never gone larger than a size 8, so we're really not of any interest to the Men.

No, Puffer - thank YOU - for remembering us, and for mentioning our new RoSa Shoes on this forum. We feel our new vintage-style extra-pointed- toe stilettos are every bit as much a niche market area - and, I would suggest, for some people as much a subject for fetishistic interest - as the extra-high heel. No doubt the long pointed toe will soon attain an even more esoteric appeal as the mass market fashion trend moves to rounder toes, thick ugly heels and small platform soles. Perhaps we will even have a "long pointed toes meeting place" on the Internet - there is in fact a "Yay for Pointy Shoes" group on MySpace with a few thousand members (and no, Sarah and I didn't start it!) Our shoes are certainly polarising opinion. Just as the "fashion police" are deliberately manipulating women's hearts and minds (and not at all subtly, we have noticed, judging from the number of uncannily-timed and deeply ludicrous "foot health" warnings in the press and online pertaining to pointed stilettos) away from the adoration of the pointed toe, we jump out of the shadows and say, "no, you don't have to go that way, you can have your stilettos EVEN MORE POINTED if that's how you like them!" That was definitely not "in the script," and quite a few people who follow or attempt to lead shoe fashion are, as a result, feeling confused right now!

I'll bet you haven't even seen any, let alone tried them on. No photo can ever tell the true story of a three-dimensional object.

All we have EVER wanted to do is recreate the look of the original"winklepicker" stilettos of approx. 1960 - the ones we used to sell as Old Stock. When it came to creating our own designs, things being as they were at the time, we were at the mercy of the English shoe component industry -especially the heel factories. Back then we wanted to base our higher shoes (we also did a 3 inch) on a four and three quarter inch heel - the same height as the conventional-toed Derber court shoes of the early 80s, but in the style of the older stilettos, with longer pointed toe and authentically thin solid metal-stemmed heel with a lot more back curve. Much like the popular Roma 8000 shoes but far better quality, longer sharper toes and slightly higher, thinner heels. The heel we attempted to re-style for this shoe was too high by over half an inch and despite our efforts to re-shape it, it stubbornly refused to look like a stiletto because it was too straight and the usual moulded plastic construction. As it was originally made for fetish use in larger sizes(i.e.cross-dressing) wear, the metal tube inside was thicker and heavier duty than usual, which was good news for breakages (as opposed to the Roma heel!) but despite removing an awful lot of plastic, it still looked thick and heavy. We absolutely hated the heavy look of it when we brought the height down, so we decided on leaving it 5 and three-eighths inches high, or just over five and a half on the larger sizes - fine for a size 7 or 8, but virtually unwearable (apart from for a few minutes at a time by a very few women like our catalogue model, Paula, and "one or two others", naming no names) below size 5. We then spent a lot of time and effort trying, without success, to find a better British-made option. As to what will sell nowadays - women seem to generally find a four inch heel as high as they like to wear to actually walk in without a platform sole. Our heel goes from three and three quarter inches on our Italian size 35 to four inches on the larger sizes, and everyone who has seen it agrees that it captures the classic stiletto look better than anything else on the market. As a glance through news photo archives will confirm, the three and three quarter inch heel was in fact the most generally accepted and popular woman's high heel (outside of the world of fetish photgraphy) in the early 1960s. Although we would agree that the four and a half inch heel was occasionally seen, many people's memories of the stiletto heel are wildly inaccurate wishful thinking, and probably based on seeing small-footed women in size two four inch heels - I know for a fact that was true of one woman I saw around town in the 60s who I, as a mere lad, thought wore incredibly high heels- I met her much later and discussed the matter with her, in fact! It was obvious she was absolutely tiny without the heels and beehive hairdo she used to wear, and even a four inch heel must have been a real struggle for her.) For the sake of the extra quarter inch, we felt an investment of a couple of thousand euros on a new heel was unnecessary at this time. We may, at some point, if RoSa does well, indulge ourselves in a higher heel, but I wonder how much normal day-to-day - or even smart evening wear- it would see nowadays, when every female in the country seems to exist in trainers or flip-flops. Let's give it a few months, anyway, and we'll see. There are a few more things we want to do on the existing heel first. For now, I would encourage anyone craving the true 1960 stiletto appeal to give our RoSa Shoes a try - even women who used to wear the original "winklepickers" and who curse what those appallingly cruelly constructed, cheap, hard, fabric-lined English or American-made pointed stilettos and their inaccurately shaped toe-boxes did to their poor feet way back then (and have suffered ever since!) find our RoSa points blissfully and unbelievably comfortable when they pluck up the courage to try them. I'm sorry, but the Italians really do know their stuff when it comes to manufacturing stilettos, and I only wish we had asked the boot-shaped country to make our shoes in the first place!

Absolutely no offence meant Puffer. I really see no reason for you to be upset. Obviously it goes without saying that I thought you were someone else we remember who "fits the profile", and I already apologised in the posting for any mistaken I.D. The "stakeouts and drive-bys" was just a bit of fun - I was merely extending an invitation to someone whom I thought we knew, a couple who actually spent a considerable sum of money with us on several pairs of shoes, to come and say Hi and renew the acquaintance. It's just a bit weird, amusing (and I must say a bit flattering) to find a forum which has been discussing us, but making various erroneous assumptions and allegations about aspects of our prior and current activities - all without our knowledge. It's all a bit "The Hills Have Eyes" - unsettling to think that someone is watching to see what shoes your wife is wearing, etc. I have posted an acount of what happened to us back in 1991 elsewhere on the HH meeting place. Please read it, and, once again, no offence meant. By the way, it was North Road, not North Street (everybody used to get that wrong!). And if you read back through the various comments, surely you will see how we took some of them to be a little disparaging of our efforts, especially our catalogue, which was in our opinion a wonderful effort (for the pre-digital era) on the part of our artist and photographer, the late Jeff Willis. Thanks for buying a copy. We have also seen insinuations that we were misrepresenting ourselves in some way (we never claimed to be "making" shoes in Brighton - the very idea is laughable if you know how the sorry remains of the shoe industry worked in England at the time), and that our shoe designs were someone else's - I can promise you that the designs in our catalogue, including the shape of the lasts and heels, were to our exact specification. Anyway, let's not dwell on the past. We now have RoSa Shoes to think about, which is a totally different thing. Thanks very much for your kind comments about our new designs, which in our opinion are what we were trying to achieve all along, and I hope we can look forward at some point to meeting you. If anyone wants to see what shoes Sarah is wearing, by the way, join MySpace.

Thanks, Tom - I suppose it all depends if people continue to use it! We are enthusiasts, fanatics even - but not martyrs. Given time, however, I feel sure we will build a very loyal clientele. As I may have said elsewhere, this time the shoes are exactly as we like them, and we have budgeted to keep them in stock in sizes 35-41 - we are not relying on anyone else's level of co-operation to fill each customer order. If anyone else has yet to bookmark our online shop, here it is http://www.rosashoes.co.uk

Roger

Puffer - I assume we know you, especially if you came to see us in Hove after the shop closed. Instead of doing stake-outs and drive-bys and giving us all the creeps, why don't you ring and make an appointment to view our incredible new shoes - we only do women's sizes, but if you're who I think you are, that shouldn't be a problem - bring her along (sorry if I'm getting you mixed up with someone else). By the way, we carry stock of all styles now - no more "made to order" (that's why there was never much in the old shop - but you know that). We have no plans at present to add a higher heel - we like them just how they are, as do most women. We have absolutely no secrets to keep from anyone here on this forum, it's just that we haven't done anything in the shoe line since 1991, apart from a small batch of used 1960s stilettos we were offered about 10 years ago, long since gone.

The answer to Rob's question is "no, it couldn't". We know nothing about bicycles and have never been to Emsworth, though we do drive past it now and again. We did design, amongst other things, quite a lot of the fetish shoes still sold by some internet shops and originally commissioned a cobbler in London to make them for us by hand ( these shoes were actually not expensive, they were way too cheap for hand made shoes), but when they tried to speed up production at new premises and the quality took a few knocks (annoying our clients in the process) we hit problems, and lost it financially in the Big Recession of 1991. Sorry for the inconvenience, but never mind, here we are again, and this time the shoes are dead right in our opinion - an almost perfect rendition of the winklepicker stilettos of 1960. The fetish heels were always an accident, as I told Oliver a while back. He also knows the evil truth behind that mis- sized shoe he was asking about - the one with our label which was actually NOT part of our collection of designs, and seems to have been sold with our label after we stopped trading - but which looks like it came from the workshop we used. Naughty!

That would be "leprechaun", I believe. And they don't.