Stilettos

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High-Heeled History

Was it Roger Vivier or Salvatore Ferragamo who invented the stiletto heel?

"That remains a bit of a mystery," said Sarah Beam, the assistant curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, a collection of 12,000 pieces of footwear covering five millenniums. The museum is marking its 10th anniversary with an exhibition, "Icons of Elegance," for which Ms. Beam and Elizabeth Semmelhack, the museum's head curator, organized some 100 designs around the innovations that made them possible.

The stiletto, for one, was made possible after World War II, when manufacturers were able to devise thin steel rods strong enough to support a woman's weight. While Vivier is commonly credited with popularizing the style with his designs for Christian Dior in the 1950's, the curators point to contemporaneous examples from Ferragamo and the American designer Beth Levine, which make it difficult to determine whose came first.

Platform shoes can be traced more directly to the Ferragamo workshops in Italy as a reaction to wartime rationing. Because steel was not readily available, Ferragamo realized he could achieve the same support by assembling layers of cork. Before that, heels were made of carved wood or punched out of stacked layers of leather.

"He did a series of rainbow platform shoes and a series of wedge platform soles that he covered with opposing leathers, often that were heavily decorated," Ms. Beam said. "When I think about Ginger Spice's platform boots in 1994, they kind of look like plain Doc Martens."

Throughout the 20th century, innovation was driven by the political climate, fetishism or feminism, but mostly it was designers who chased the next big idea, beginning at the turn of the century with Jean-Louis François Pinet, the first to design under his own name and produce in large quantities. André Perugia, a discovery of Paul Poiret, is considered the major innovator of the first half of the century. His whimsical designs referred to the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Léger (including a high heel in the shape of a fish after a study by Georges Braque).

The fame of Ferragamo and Vivier at midcentury and the colorful variety and mass production of Charles Jourdan led to the modern cast of designers, including Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin, who are celebrated for their teetering designs.

"One of the things that is underrated in fashion history is just how much the 20th century changed footwear design," Ms. Semmelhack said. "The innovations were profound. That designers are coming back to these ideas again and again is an homage to this incredible shift."