OH, how the high and mighty have fallen!
We mean high heels, of course.
Sick of tottering around in 6-inch platform stilettos, starlets are scaling back, opting for summer’s shorter-shoe trend — cute, easier-to-walk-in sandals and pumps featuring heels that top out at 3 ½ inches.
Dubbed “halfway heels” — for being half the height of their red-carpet relatives — fashion-forward cover girls like Maggie Gyllenhaal, Katy Perry and Leighton Meester have all been spotted sporting the trendy new height.
Stores are also brimming with the foot-friendlier shoes — great news for New York women, who for years have been getting caught in subway grates, tripping over cobblestones and gingerly tiptoeing around cracked pavement like fashion roadkill in their 5-inch spike heels, sometimes failing, miserably.
Elizabeth Scherle, a senior account executive, knows a thing or two about shoe disasters.
“I had on these huge platforms I’d purchased in London for, like, $40,” Scherle says. “I was visiting a friend in San Diego, and we went to a wedding together, so we were pretty tanked by the time we left the reception. Decided we should go out more, so, while running across the street to the bar, I bit it, fell down and crushed both bones in my leg.
“I was given the option of a body cast or a metal rod in my leg, so I chose the rod,” she says. “My dad still calls those platforms the $50,000 shoes.”
We’ve always known that super-high heels are bad for us. “They’re dangerous, you can trip, break your ankle,” says Dr. Morris Morin, chairman of podiatry at the Hackensack University Medical Center, “and wearing them can lead to nerve pain, bone pain, even neuroma.”
Still, some say they’ll never give up their heels.
“I’m ‘that girl’ who’s walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in stiletto Dior sandals,” says fashion editor Stephanie Rygorsky.
“I’m a die-hard heel wearer and a relatively tall girl — 5-foot-9 — so as the trend for sky-high shoes has gotten more aggressive every season, I’ve just had to make sure my boyfriends have also gotten progressively taller. Thank God my current beau is 6-foot-5 — I can wear any shoe I want and not intimidate him!”