Toronto Star article March 4, 2010

iloveboots · March 13, 2010

Men sex it up with high heels

It's no longer just women who squeeze into designer footwear – fashion-forward guys find this edgy look really stacks up, I feel taller, fiercer, and it goes with that rock 'n' roll attitude.

By Derick Chetty Fashion Reporter/Toronto Star March 4, 2010

From Toronto to New York to Paris, young men are squeezing their big feet into high heels from the women's shoe department.

It should be noted these are not Bay St. types or Wall St. bankers, or drag queens looking for cheap patent pumps from Payless.

They are fashion fanatics and only the hottest labels in women's footwear will do: Balenciaga, Rodarte and Alexander Wang.

The high heels are not feminine. They are aggressive and edgy in shape and style, typically stacked on sturdy platforms.

Or they are heels with heft, ideal for fashionable men with no interest in full-on cross-dressing. They prefer to rock their streamlined heels with skinny jeans, T-shirts and perhaps a leather jacket. And because they're hard-core fashionistas with personal style, they add their own twists, such as a big hat.

Take Montrealer Cary Tauben, a stylist and fashion editor of Kill magazine, www.dresstokillmagazine.com. Tauben attended the Jeremy Laing presentation at New York fashion week last month in the hipster attire of a grungy rock star – tight black jeans, leather jacket, and knit beanie hat over waist-length black hair. But on his feet, were a pair of European size 41 women's high-heeled boots, a purchase from the fashion mecca of trendiness, Top Shop.

Tauben got hooked on heels a few years ago when he bought a pair from uber-cool New York boutique Opening Ceremony.

"I've never looked back. Now I rarely wear flat shoes, probably only on airplanes," he says.

Sales staff in the women's shoe department didn't flinch when Tauben tried on thigh-high Rodarte boots at the Barney's Warehouse sale earlier that day.

"I think because of my overall style, they don't second-guess me. They can tell I care about fancy shoes.

The last time men wore elevated heels was in the 1970s when hyper masculine rock stars such as Gene Simmons from KISS and glam rocker performers David Bowie and Elton John pranced around both on and off stage in towering platform shoes.

"I feel that blip in the '70s when men are trying high heels is linked to gangster culture, blaxsploition images of the pimp and to rock stars," says Elizabeth Semmelhack, curator of the Bata Shoe Museum and author of Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe.

It's that rock-star attitude that attracted Toronto singer Fritz Helder, lead singer of the band Fritz Helder and The Phantoms, to women's heels.

"I feel taller, fiercer and it goes with that rock 'n' roll attitude," he says. "I can go out and stomp all over."

Citing Prince and Rick James as his inspiration, he says describes the heels as masculine and aggressive.

"It's not so much sexual. It just feels like I'm in command – a strange confidence, almost like a warrior."

Remarkably, it was warriors who first wore heels centuries ago.

Semmelhack says the high heel was a Near East (Turkey and Persia) invention and military men on horse back wore them.

Heels for men then showed up in western dress for the first time in the 1590s — mostly in places like England with some references in Italy.

"I think they adapted it as a sign of masculine prowess and equestrian strength," she says.

While men were the early adopters, upper-class women followed immediately and the high heel became a symbol of status.

By the end of the 17th century, when the heel started to become feminized, men abandoned it until the 1970s.

And now there are small signs that it could be making a resurgence.

Yves Saint Laurent has been pushing a stacked three-inch heel boot for men for a few seasons now.

Canadian shoe designer John Fluevog issued a gleaming platinum men's boot on a heel of the same height last season. It sold out immediately, said a sales associate at the Queen St. W. location.

Rad Hourani, a Canadian designer who shows at New York fashion week, has been sending male and female models down the runway in the same chunky heeled square-toe boot for several seasons. For fall 2010 we saw an open-toe boot, worn with socks.

But it's in the men's shoe department at Barneys in Manhattan where the ultimate high heel for men resides. A sleek towering platform wedge ankle boot – almost 13 centimetres tall – by designer Rick Owens.

Don't be too hasty in saying never-in-a-million years will a guy wear that. So influential is Owens that his skinny-armed and asymmetrical-lapel leather jackets are one of the most copied items in the fashion world today.

Is it possible that after seasons of women's footwear reaching fantastical heights and extraordinary designs, men got heel envy?

"The fashion forward guy can't find extravagant styles – men's footwear is still conservative – this is one way they can really push their look," says Andrea Beechey, a sales associate at Chasse Gardee, a hip Queen St. W. shoe boutique where men frequently buy up larger sizes of the edgy labels of women's shoes from London and New York.

"They squish their toes in. They will suffer the pain, they want it so bad."

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Dawn HH · March 14, 2010

Excellent article. It is about time that everyone sees that men are liking the wearing of heels to augment their daily outfits. Cheers--- Dawn HH

Cuban Nicky · March 14, 2010

It is great news for us all when articles like this get written. The more the word is spread, the more heels for the guys will become standard street wear.