Plush Nights

Something is stirring in mens fashion.. steady yourselves, because high heels for the heftier sex are making a return.

Little shoe backers including Karl Lagerfeld, Prince, Richard Hammond and Nicolas Sarkozy have long stood up for the discreet ( ish ) Cuban heel. Now, though , height-enhancing shoes has started to infuse across a wider demographic. For the 1st time since Glam Rock topped thirty years back, men of average height are discovering the wonders of one or two additional inches. Well-heeled shoes of all sorts, from craftily sized standing shoes to 21st century platforms, are enjoying a new style.

The man-heel or meel as some have called it is at the same time a coming trend in a few wildly different milieus. The most attention-grabbing examples are going to be found in the semi-Goth, semi-glam society of high-fashion men’s clothing obsessives. The natural territories for these platform-heeled pathfinders include Hoxton, TopMan at Oxford Circus and diverse world fashion weeks.

In Paris this spring, both Gareth Pugh’s and Rick Owen’s shows were attended by high-heeled male audience members. It was actually the same at Rodarte in NY and Pam Hogg in London. Important man-platforms are being produced by Jean-Michel Cazabat and Owens himself. Both offer man-heels of roughly 4 inches and upwards. This fashion-pack dalliance may have been catalysed by Marc Jacobs, maybe the industry’s most influential bellwether of style. 2 years gone the designer let slip that he often wore women’s heels to suffer for fashion. Jacobs informed the Times : If I put heels in a collection I usually try them on and walk round the studios in them in the fittings, which take as much as thirty six hours. It raises a giggle with the team for roughly 5 mins because they have seen me do it such a lot of times. But that isn’t why I am doing it. I am doing it because I need to show that I am not some misogynist designer planning these torturous shoes for ladies. The heels are there as a choice and if you would like to wear them all of the time, some of the time or never, it’s your choice. He added : I do not wear them out on the street. Some male style mavens nevertheless, do even go as far as to wear highly female styles outside. The street fashion photograph blog of Peter Stigter shows one case of a young man outside of the NY fashion week locale wearing strappy, open-toed stilettos grouped with a fringed purse. These camp, provocatively gender-skewing style statements aren’t the only real way in which the man-heel is blooming. A mariachi-meets-Keith Richards shoe shape a pointed shoe or boot teamed with a silhouette-boosting heel is establishing preferred among an explicitly male crowd. Dior Homme’s collection features a cool pointed suede ankle boot that gives about 2 inches of additional lift. Selfridges reports a specific hunger for this kind of boot. Sam Lobban, a recent consumer for the store, described the look as showy, but in an edgy, cool way.

Heeled boots are the height of this and appear a natural turn for our customer rock and roll twinned with finesse.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.