Personally, I’ve never really got the point. Even back in the 1980s, when pointed-toe shoes were enjoying perhaps their greatest heyday, they never made sense to me. I totally get the idea of using clothes to, as one’s mom might say, “enhance one’s natural assets” — which generally means the precise opposite of that, as it’s just a pretty way of saying “faking it.”
But while, say, a push-up bra or control-top panties sculpt certain body parts into their fantasy shape, who wants to pretend that they have a foot that resembles the top half of a triangle? Is it really worth crushing one’s toes into a very painful pyramid shape to achieve this apparently desirable fantasy?
Yes, we’ve all heard that canard about a pointed toe “lengthening and slimming the leg,” and while I’m all for somehow making my legs look longer, I still don’t understand how pretending my toes have been attenuated to primate lengths would make anyone think my limbs look Amazonian.
PHOTO: AP
And for a while, it looked as if everyone had come around to my way of thinking. Round-toes have pretty much ruled the shoe world for the past decade, with a tenacity that belies their innocently girlish appearance.
But a decade is a century in fashion years (like dog years, but longer and potentially more fatal if underestimated) so it was inevitable that the point should return at some point. And lo, it has come to pass.
At Balenciaga — pretty much the bellwether for trends that the masses will be adopting — the gladiator sandals it knocked out last season (which, as anyone who has been outside in the past three months can testify, proves the previous point) have been replaced for autumn/winter by shoes so pointy they will probably double as weapons for the requisite eastern European villainess in the next Bond film.
PHOTO: EPA
Even Marc Jacobs, who is surely Coco Chanel’s successor in his tireless promotion of the sweet and girly look, has pushed aside his beloved mouse pumps (literally, ballet pumps with little beaded eyes and whiskers fixed on the tip) for decidedly more grown-up and less rodentesque pointier toes, at both his own eponymous label and in the current collection for Louis Vuitton. Similarly, the Lanvin woman seems to have matured from the pretty, round-toed mademoiselle she was just a few seasons ago to a full-on vamp, with black, sharp-toed teetering heels. “Round toes are on their way out and pointy toes are marching back into our wardrobes!” one fashion magazine gleefully announced this month.
The reason trends wane is not just because of overexposure. Usually, it’s the related but slightly different cause of bad association. When they first appeared, sloppy suede pirate-style boots were redolent of an elfin kind of cool, mainly because the only person most of us had seen wearing them was Kate Moss. But with impressive rapidity they became more associated with grubby teens and posing British soccer players’ wives because, well, that’s who everyone now saw wearing them.
Pointed-toe shoes have a somewhat different association: that of the scary, high-maintenance 1980s woman, one whose blow-dried hair is bettered only by her shoulder pads in terms of girth and stiffness. Even worse were the pastel kitten heels with elongated pointed toes (still scary but, like, feminine, yeah?) that were so popular in the early 1990s.
But the reactions against this over-coiffured look have not, it has to be said, been particularly edifying for women. Let’s see — there was grunge in the mid 1990s, which was just marvelous for confirming that if you don’t wash your hair for a week, wear at least seven shirts piled on top of each other paired with a floor-length kilt, and ideally accessorize the whole ensemble with some battered DM boots, you will look like Ophelia, mid-demise, if Ophelia had lived in Seattle in 1994.
Then there was the infantile look that arrived at the beginning of this decade, of which round-toe shoes were very much a part, as they went just marvelously with one’s empire-line tops and dresses, cropped cardigans and polka-dot prom dresses. Perfect if one’s fashion icon is a 2-year-old.
So, there is something pleasing in the idea that women are being encouraged to dress like grownups again, as opposed to the residentially challenged or toddlers. When a woman wants to look mature, she points her toes (in the non-balletic sense, that is). Just look at Katie Holmes, still trying valiantly to shuck off her Dawson’s Creek Joey persona and look like a 40-something Hollywood wife, as befits her marital position. And look how proud of them she is, too, buying a pair in bright blue to go with her fire-engine-red dress for the recent Met Ball in New York, making her look like a walking box of crayons.
Anna Wintour, unsurprisingly, never relinquished her pointed Manolo Blahnik heels throughout the round-toe era. But funnily enough, this never seemed to sway the masses in their opinion that this was a shoe style only for the very scary and those overly dedicated to the cause of looking thin.
Michelle Obama, as is the case in regards to pretty much everything in my book, does it better. With her no-nonsense attitude and general aura of I’m-getting-some-and-getting-it-good sexiness, it was inevitable that her shoes would be as sharp (and a little bit scary) as the woman herself. And no question, pointed-toe shoes work with her slim-fitting shift dresses and suits in a way that round toes wouldn’t. But some problems remain.
Obama aside, when I think of modern day pointed-toe shoe fans today, I think of flagrantly high-maintenance (and presumably painfully bunioned) ladies like Elizabeth Hurley and Nancy Dell’Olio.
But shoe designer Rupert Sanderson, whose collection for next season includes some undeniably tempting pointed toes, says that the new pointed toe is of a different incarnation to its 1980s, Eurotrash predecessors. “The pointed toe probably does scare some people because they still associate it with those long pointed-toe kitten heels we saw a decade or so ago, or the sharp stilettos that were around in the past,” he says. “In our collection for next season, the shoes are pointed but foreshortened, in more of a 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, very sexy, confident, grown-up way.”
The modern converts do seem to bear this out. Kate Hudson, for example, a woman whose love of playing the girly card was once bettered only by Emma Bunton, was recently photographed wearing just such a pair of foreshortened pointy shoes and looked quite marvelous, the grown-up shape making her look less gratingly bubbly than usual.
The much-vaunted shoe designer Jonathan Kelsey has done a collection for Mulberry next season that also uses this slightly 1950s style of a shortened point. “It’s still cute but sexier than the traditional elongated point, but it still puts some power dressing back into their shoes,” he says. And into their wardrobes? “Well, I do think it will make women look at their wardrobes differently. It’s a more formal, grown-up look than the vintage-style round toe.” As for the all-important comfort factor — surely the greatest benefit to the round toe — Kelsey is adamant that as long as the shoe is made well, “It is perfectly comfortable — I don’t for a minute want to crush anyone’s toes.”
Whether women will actually retire their beloved ballet pumps (which, to be frank, are getting pretty grubby) remains to be seen: once one has had the glimpse of paradise that is being allowed to walk around town in what are little more than slippers, the road back is long and untempting. But if it sparks a return to women actually dressing as grownups — not scary Amazonians, not slobs, not children — but confident, attractive women, it’s hard not to feel that maybe a point is being well made.
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