page_title: High-heeled shoe
section_title: 1700s
hierarchical_section_title: High-heeled shoe / History / 1700s
caption_attribution_description: English: Early eighteenth century ladies' shoes (mules).
context_page_description: High heels are a type of shoe in which the heel, compared with the toe, is significantly higher off the ground. They make the wearer appear taller, accentuates the muscle tone in their legs and makes their legs appear visibly taller. There are many types of high heels, which come in different styles, colors and materials, and can be found all over the world. They have significant cultural and fashionable meanings attached to them, which have been largely shaped by historical contexts over the past 1,000 years. Wearing high heels is associated with some health problems.
context_section_description: Modern high heels were brought to Europe by emissaries of Abbas the Great in the early 17th century. Men wore them to imply their upper-class status; only someone who did not have to work could afford, both financially and practically, to wear such extravagant shoes. Royalty such as King Louis XIV wore heels to impart status. As the shoes caught on, and other members of society began donning high heels, elite members ordered their heels to be made even higher to distinguish themselves from lower classes. Authorities even began regulating the length of a high heel's point according to social rank. Klaus Carl includes these lengths in his book Shoes: "½ inch for commoners, 1 inch for the bourgeois, 1 and ½ inches for knights, 2 inches for nobles, and 2 and ½ inches for princes."” As women took to appropriating this style, the heels’ width changed in another fundamental way. Men wore thick heels, while women wore skinny ones. Then, when Enlightenment ideals such as science, nature, and logic took hold of many European societies, men gradually stopped wearing heels. After the French Revolution in the late 1780s, heels, femininity, and superficiality all became intertwined. In this way, heels became much more associated with a woman's supposed sense of impracticality and extravagance.
  The design of the high French heels from the late 1600s to around the 1720s placed body weight on the ball of the foot, and were decorated with lace or braided fabric (pictured). From the 1730s-1740s, wide heels with an upturned toe and a buckle fastening became popular. The 1750s and 1760s introduced a skinnier, higher heel. The 1790s continued this trend, but added combinations of color. Additionally, throughout all of these decades, there was no difference between the right and left shoe.
  In Britain in 1770, an act was introduced into the parliament which would have applied the same penalties as witchcraft to the use of high heels and other cosmetic devices.
caption: Typical 18th-century shoe
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