HAGGIS AND HEELS

The origin of high heels

For generations they have signified femininity and glamour - but a pair of high heels was once an essential accessory for men.

Beautiful, provocative, sexy - high heels may be all these things and more, but even their most ardent fans wouldn't claim they were practical.

 

 

"The high heel was worn for centuries throughout the near east as a form of riding footwear," says Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

Good horsemanship was essential to the fighting styles of the Persia - the historical name for modern-day Iran.

"When the soldier stood up in his stirrups, the heel helped him to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more effectively," says Semmelhack.

At the end of the 16th Century, Persia's Shah Abbas I had the largest cavalry in the world. He was keen to forge links with rulers in Western Europe to help him defeat his great enemy, the Ottoman Empire.

So in 1599, Abbas sent the first Persian diplomatic mission to Europe - it called on the courts of Russia, Germany and Spain.

A wave of interest in all things Persian passed through Western Europe. Persian style shoes were enthusiastically adopted by aristocrats, who sought to give their appearance a virile, masculine edge that, it suddenly seemed, only heeled shoes could supply.

As the wearing of heels filtered into the lower ranks of society, the aristocracy responded by dramatically increasing the height of their shoes - and the high heel was born.

In the muddy, rutted streets of 17th Century Europe, these new shoes had no utility value whatsoever - but that was the point.

"One of the best ways that status can be conveyed is through impracticality," says Semmelhack, adding that the upper classes have always used impractical, uncomfortable and luxurious clothing to announce their privileged status.

"They aren't in the fields working and they don't have to walk far."

When it comes to history's most notable shoe collectors, the Imelda Marcos of his day was arguably Louis XIV of France. For a great king, he was rather diminutively proportioned at only 5ft 4in (1.63m).

He supplemented his stature by a further 4in (10cm) with heels, often elaborately decorated with depictions of battle scenes.

The heels and soles were always red - the dye was expensive and carried a martial overtone. The fashion soon spread overseas - Charles II of England's coronation portrait of 1661 features him wearing a pair of enormous red, French style heels - although he was over 6ft (1.85m) to begin with.

In the 1670s, Louis XIV issued an edict that only members of his court were allowed to wear red heels. In theory, all anyone in French society had to do to check whether someone was in favour with the king was to glance downwards. In practice, unauthorised, imitation heels were available.

 While today's fashion designers have a huge array of plastics and metals in their toolbox, it was an engineering challenge for 17th Century shoemakers to support the instep on a high heel

• One solution was to place the heel very far forward in the shoe - this effectively transferred the problem from the shoemaker to the wearer

Although Europeans were first attracted to heels because the Persian connection gave them a macho air, a craze in women's fashion for adopting elements of men's dress meant their use soon spread to women and children.

"In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding epaulettes to their outfits," says Semmelhack.

"They would smoke pipes, they would wear hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel - it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits."

From that time, Europe's upper classes followed a unisex shoe fashion until the end of the 17th Century, when things began to change again.

"You start seeing a change in the heel at this point," says Helen Person, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. "Men started to have a squarer, more robust, lower, stacky heel, while women's heels became more slender, more curvaceous."

Association Elizabeth Semmelhack believes that high heels began to be seen as erotic footwear when they came back into fashion in the late 19th Century - the nude models on French postcards were often wearing them

Biology Dr Helen Fischer, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, says that heels force women into a "natural courting pose" found amongst mammals, with an arched back and protruding buttocks

“Well, my buttocks protrudes, so I guess I must be a hotty? Ha.

Men must have looked ridiculous? I don’t think I could find a man in high heels attractive.

 A skirt perhaps? Hahaha.

 

The offal truth about American haggis

Traditional Scottish haggis is banned in the United States. With Burns Night looming, how do fans satisfy their taste for oatmeal and offal?

For aficionados, it is the "great chieftain o' the pudding-race".

To sceptics, however, it is a gruesome mush of sheep's innards - and for decades American authorities have agreed.

Authentic Scottish haggis has been banned in the United States since 1971, when the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) first took a dim view of one of its key ingredients - sheep's lung.

While millions of people around the world will enjoy, or endure, a Burns Night helping on 25 January, those in the US who want to celebrate Scotland's national bard in the traditional manner are compelled to improvise.

We're lucky if some of them take more than a mouthful”

End Quote Haggis fan Jim Short in LaGrange, Georgia

Some choose to stage offal-free Burns suppers, and for most people not raised in Scotland, the absence of the dish - comprising sheep's "pluck" (heart, liver and lungs) minced with onion, oatmeal, suet and spices, all soaked in stock and then boiled in either a sausage casing or a sheep's stomach - might be no great hardship.

But for many expat Scots and Scots-Americans, the notion of Burns Supper without haggis is as unthinkable as Thanksgiving without turkey.

According to custom, the haggis should be paraded into the room with a bagpiper before Robert Burns' poem Address to a Haggis is recited and the dish is served as the main course.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the pudding-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy o'a grace As lang's my arm

Even when I ate meat, I no way could even put that on a fork.

Sorry my Scottish friends, I love Scotland, but not the above. Give me Yorkshire puddings any day?