Heeeere Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

Kitty, where are you?I was looking for kitten heels for a long time. But not just any kitten heels: I had a specific picture in mind. They had to be black, pointy-toed and thin, with delicate sling-backs. I was on this self-appointed mission for a year or more at the height (no pun intended) of the mania for the toweringest platform heels it was humanly possible to build. (I actually own some of these too – so big a crane is required to lift my foot into them.)

I searched every brick-and-mortar store, glimpsing neither hide nor hair of a pair. Exhaustively I trawled every shoe emporium online, to no avail. My hopes were dashed, my crest was fallen. I read, in online forums, of a curious antipathy many women have towards kitten heels: they are judged to be inexcusably dowdy. But I had nothing but fond recollections of a pair I owned many years ago. Who were these women taking as role models? I wondered in surprise.

I have only to think of Audrey Hepburn who must always be considered stylish, and another actress of the 1960s, the Italian Monica Vitti to be convinced that kitten heels are elegant, as well as comfortable.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’sMonica Vitti wears kittens in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic L’EclisseMonica Vitti in kitten heels only looks cooler with Alain Delon at her side, on the set of L’EclisseHistorically, kitten heels were intended for teens. They were introduced in the late 1950s as trainer heels for teenagers, and also because higher heels ‘would have been considered unseemly for girls as young as thirteen because of the sexual connotations’ [Wikipedia]. By the 60s though, women of all ages were wearing them; the aforementioned Audrey Hepburn helped make them popular. They re-emerged in the 1980s and again briefly in the noughties. Of course since then the wedge and the platform have driven them firmly out of the fashion landscape.

Manolo Blahnik’s elegant rendition of kitten heels, Vogue Australia, May 1999I finally found my obscurely-branded pair on a sale site a couple months ago, but the leather is soft and they are comfortable to wear and walk in. Patently the fashion world has finally begun to tire of monster shoes, for once more the demure kitten heel is having a renaissance – I wouldn’t mind adding a pair of nude kitten heels (that sounds so naughty!) to my arsenal of shoes. It will be a novel sensation to put away the platform and feel the pavement beneath thin-soled shoes once more. 

The Isabel kitten peep toe pumps, by Jimmy Choo – click to buyDaniel beige slingbacks, the polar opposite of my black pair – click to buy