A rebellious history of the kitten heel

It seems five minutes ago that it was over for heels. Covid sounded their supposed death knell. So why am I wearing a pair of kitten heels as I write?
Because it’s been over for heels before, and ended up not being. And it will no doubt be over for them again in the future, until — I confidently wager — it isn’t. Why? It may pain me to say so — perhaps literally if I change up my footwear accordingly — but rare is the woman who doesn’t look better in heels. And if you look better you tend to feel better. Until, that is, that very precise moment any heel wearer will recognise, when you suddenly don’t, and would pay a lot of money to be able to lie down.
This article contains affiliate links that can earn us revenue
Except the 2024 heel is wearable and walkable. No pain is required. It’s a kitten heel, and while a kitten may serve as a height-booster and leg-lengthener almost as effectively as, er, a full-blown cat, it absolutely doesn’t have to be taken lying down. Five centimetres or so of added height doesn’t ask for much but gives a lot.
That’s why skyscraper heels are still missing in action on the front row of the shows, while kittens are everywhere. Pretty much the only thing that gets Chioma Nnadi, who now heads up British Vogue, out of her beloved Adidas trainers are her Gucci kittens in Sabato De Sarno’s new — deep and delicious — Ancora Red (£840, gucci.com).
The rest of the British fashion pack live in Jimmy Choo (like the stunningly sculptural Amita Flowers, £795, jimmychoo.com), Dear Frances (the toe-post Flis, perfect for summer; £450, dearfrances.com) and Prada (its slingback with an origami twist of leather at the front; £1,090, prada.com). Miuccia Prada, in particular, has been killing with her kittens for decades. What I would give to get my hands on her personal collection; or, rather, my feet into them.
The inherent contradiction at the heart of a higher heel — that the very thing that initially gives you a literal and metaphorical lift ends up breaking you or, at the very least, breaking the balls of your feet — doesn’t apply to the God-given entity that is the kitten. The winged sandals of Apollo they may not be, yet kittens can — and I speak from recent experience — take you from brunch to cocktails without a second thought, not to mention a first blister.
Kittens are the thinking woman’s heel, the walking woman’s heel, the dancing woman’s heel, the happy-until-the-very-end-of-the-night woman’s heel. The fact that they were originally conceived in the late 1950s as a starter heel aimed at girls in their early teens is long forgotten. In America they were even referred to as “trainer heels”. What began as footwear’s answer to bike stabilisers — to be abandoned once suitable expertise in manoeuvring, not to mention balancing, had been attained — has come to represent not just a first chapter but, for me and, I imagine, myriad other women like me, a happily-ever-after, till-death-do-us-part ending.
It has to be the least surprising development in fashion that the kitten’s age specificity shouldn’t have lasted long. It was just a few years after the invention of the kitten that the shift came about; in 1961, when Audrey Hepburn — then in her early thirties — wore them in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the rest of womankind immediately wanted her own pair.
It was symptomatic of a bigger change. If the decade before had seen the so-called invention of the teenager, shaped by performances such as James Dean’s and Natalie Wood’s in Rebel Without a Cause, the 1960s saw a further recalibration of attitudes towards ageing. Now it wasn’t just that the young were recognised as a category apart, but that people who were decades older wanted to pass as young too, and were adopting everything from jeans to kitten heels in order to do so. Hepburn was the personification of that: the ultimate child-woman, gamine until the end of time.
The kitten heel may not look it, in other words, yet it has rebellion at its heart. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or, to be more accurate, a big cat in a small cat’s shoe. Listen very carefully and maybe that miaow is a growl.