Arch Enemies
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he point is to bounce, just a little. That’s the shoes’ way of telling you—a little wobble, a little give—that all is well: that the shock of your footfall, heelfloortoe, heelfloortoe, is being absorbed. Dolly Singh, the CEO of the shoe design firm Thesis Couture, is explaining this as I walk in a prototype version of footwear that has thus far been, due to limitations that are only partially technological in nature, pretty much impossible to imagine: shoes that are at once extremely high and relatively comfortable to wear. “What you should be feeling is, hopefully, a lot less pinch in the front than you normally do in 4-inch heels,” Singh tells me. “Because of this arch-support area”—she points toward the sole of the model I’m wearing—“it’s supposed to push your weight back towards your heel.”
You know what? It does. Or, at least, walking in a pair of Thesis stilettos—whose shanks, and heels, are constructed mostly of dense, slightly flexible polymer (“ballistics-grade,” Thesis’s marketing literature points out)—minimized the reflex that walking in heels normally produces in me: the need to adjust my limbs and my overall self to compensate for my unnaturally raised foot. The shoes I’m wearing, Singh told me, are only about 70 percent completed, design-wise; still, even at the prototype stage, you feel that cushion and that give and that reassuring little bounce. You feel the shock of your walk being eased. You definitely would not run in these shoes, in the manner of Carrie Bradshavian fantasy; you could, however, very reasonably walk in them. At least for, you know, a little while.
Singh, 37, is a former recruiter at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket engineering firm whose offices in Hawthorne, CA, consist largely of hangar and factory space. She spent much of her time on that job walking—“about 3 to 4 miles a day,” she recalls—on hard floors that were particularly ill-suited to the wearing of heels. She wore them anyway: Working in an industry dominated by men, she appreciated the few extra inches of height the shoes gave her. (And also: the sense of professionalism, and of femininity.) It didn’t take much research to realize that many women, every day, live their own version of that compromise. So, when Singh left SpaceX, she recruited some of its employees—among them, yes, a rocket scientist and a former astronaut—to help solve a problem that is generally not treated as a problem at all so much as an unfortunate fact of ladylife: the insult and occasionally the injury that can come from the wearing of heels.
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tripped of their symbolism, heels are, simply, shoes like any other: objects that help to separate the human foot, which is inconveniently soft, from the surface of the earth, which is inconveniently hard. And yet, of course, heels do—heels are—so much more than mere footwear. In their teetering heights, they make audacious assumptions about fashion and feminism and professionalism and sex and privilege and power and its opposite, and about the way all those things, in the early 21st century, chafe against each other. Heels at once lift women up and hold them—hold us—back. And, of course: We choose, day by day and week by week and Special Occasion by Special Occasion, to let them do it. Heels are both a claim of femininity and a test of it. They are the bindings of the willfully bound.
In that sense, while Thesis’s comfortable heel represents a small feat, so to speak, it also represents a very large one: a counterargument to a longstanding assumption—rendered in fashion as well as in many other areas of the culture—that womanhood is defined, in part, by the ability to bear pain. Not just in the sense of “suffering for beauty,” as the saying goes, but in the deeper sense that the collision of those two things is integral to feminine experience. It’s an assumption that helps to explain why stilettos have become such quintessential symbols of womanhood; it also helps to explain why they are, as those symbols, so deeply unsettling. Heels hurt. They slow their wearers down. They occasionally trip them up.
What Thesis’s work suggests, though, is that the technology of the heel, the manufactured thing that takes its name from the natural one, could change the politics of the heel. The comfortable stiletto Thesis is promising is one that, simply because it hurts its wearers less, also demands less of them—and, by extension, of all of us.
Thesis is certainly not the
