High-heeled shoe: Encyclopedia II - High-heeled shoe - Men and Heels

High-heeled shoe - Men and Heels

Except for cowboy boots, which continued to be used as a riding heel, men's shoes sported only low heels until a brief resurgence in the 1970s.

While high heels are marketed almost exclusively to women, a small percentage of men have worn, and continue to wear heels for various reasons, including personal preference, medical reasons, gender identity issues, and fetish roles. Although the idea of men wearing heels certainly isn't new, it is unusual in modern times, and as a result, some pockets of society consider it deviant. Whether it meets DSM-IV criteria for deviancy or not, however, depends entirely on one's reason behind wearing heels, and many people, including psychologists, don't consider it deviant at all, regardless of the reason, simply due to the fact that gender-specific clothing styles are rapidly disappearing anyway, as well as the fact that men invented heels, and wore them for more than 200 years before fashions changed, as they invariably do. Surprisingly, however, many men who report wearing masculine-styled heels in public not only encounter very little resistance, but are met with a surprising amount of appreciation and encouragement for their choice of fashion.

As an example, the last four decades of rock and roll have seen many performers wearing heels, both on and off the stage. Many men have worn high heels in secret over the last century, but a surprising number have worn heels in public, as well, usually in the form of high-heeled boots. Over the last decade, the Internet has brought together many men who consider the wearing of heels, and even skirts, as merely the continuation of what men have been doing for hundreds of years in the case of heels, and tens of thousands of years in the case of wearing skirts. In fact, more than a third of all men worldwide still wear skirts on a regular basis, but this is largely lost on the somewhat insulated Western fashion culture. While the wearing of heels by men in public is still rare, it's a continually growing phenomenon, one that appears to be accelerating.

The practice of men wearing heels continues to grow throughout Westernized countries including the US and Europe, and to a lesser extent in various pockets of Asia. This trend has not been lost on fashion designers, who have occasionally featured men wearing heels on the runways since the mid 1990s. Recent changes by shoe manufacturers, including marketing more masculine styles and heels with significantly larger sizes to accommodate men, appears to underscore this trend, and many of the more masculine high-heeled shoe and boot designs that were only available in sizes up to 11 just two years ago are now available in sizes up to 13.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Men and Heels", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki