Trace the evolution of high heels across 100 years

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/07/trace-the-evolution-of-high-he.html

None of which explains why Bryce Dallas Howard wore them while running away from a T-Rex in Jurassic World.
Because they made her calves look fantastic, improved her posture and added a certain vavoom to her step, obviously.

If you want to run away in flats from a dinosaur, be my guest, but don’t be surprised if people remember the dinosaur instead of you.

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I am relatively certain even with a pair of fabulous manolo blahniks the dinosaur will be more memorable.

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A dinosaur in Manalo Blahniks? Now, that’s memorable!

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With those thick ankles? Come on!

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You didn’t know they come is size 9000’s?

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Evolution doesn’t happen in a hundred years (mostly…for the scientifically nit-picky among us). It’s on a millions-of-years time scale. Even high heels are on a thousands-of-years historical trajectory.

Sorry to be so grumpy, but a video of one person’s feet wearing 10 moderately different versions of the same type of shoe from the same socio-economic lifestyle isn’t worth the time to watch it.

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Probably closer to 30 or 40. Interesting if you pay attention to shoes. Not so much if you don’t.

But it’s what’s inside that counts.

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She was trying to stay on her toes. The heels where very strategic.

I beg to differ. IMHO, women who wear flats all the time have nicer, more muscular legs. However, if you’re into women who do nothing all day but read Cosmo and Bridal Monthly, YMMV.

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“History”? Hardly. No overview of high heels deserves to be called a history when it has zero reference to the patriarchal imperatives that cause women to wear the damn things in the first place.

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“Evolution” is just change over time. It doesn’t matter if the timescale is geological eras, centuries, decades, years or one particularly intense lunchtime brainstorming session, if you get something different at the end from the beginning then it’s evolution. Even if you’re talking about biological evolution (…why?), evolution has been demonstrated in bacteria in timescales far less than a century (antibiotics cough).

Sorry, but you’re just being grumpy. Even if you’re not interested in shoes, some people have to be in order for designs to progress. Those things you wear on your feet are the way they are because people have been interested in improving the things beyond the animal-skins-tied-up-with-string stage.

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So, more like intelligent design then?

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Sure, intelligent design could be a form of evolution, in the widest sense of the word. So is Lysenkoism. The cultural war between science and the fundamentalists have confused things, but natural selection is not synonymous with evolution, it’s just the form of evolution that dominates in the biological sphere.

It is not an entirely unprecedented use of the word ‘evolution’ to describe designing things, or the gradual shift from one type of clothing to another, or any other cultural trend. I’m sure with a few moments’ thought, one can think of others.

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High Heels de Millie:

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Quite simply the finest piece of filmmaking from the last 20 years. The mosquito in amber…

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Is that true generally, or only with regards to women?

Another problem is that women (or anyone) in flats will come out of their stirrups easily if on a horse. But of course, if one is riding a horse bareback, all bets are off (and one is then guaranteed muscular legs).

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