WOMEN’S
you want a job, because dress code is a part of it.
"At a lot of work places, you are expected to dress up and
you are exempt if you've medical reasons or are pregnant. The look they are trying to achieve is probably modern and elegant, which perhaps reflects their business,"
she says. Her reading of what happened at the London
multinational is it might have been a case of miscommunication. Medical
practitioners,
with good reason,
are waving the red
card. Orthopaedic
surgeon Suresh Annamalai warns that
looking good comes
at a price. "When
you are barefoot,
the body weight is
equally distributed;
that is the natural alignment. The
dynamics change
when you wear
heels," he says.
PRICE OF BEAUTY
Dr Annamalai explains that when
the heel is one inch
high, there is 22%
pressure on the fore
foot. This increases
rather dramatically
to 57% with two
inches and 76%
with three inches.
"That is a lot of pressure on the foot," he
says, adding that in
a study conducted
in the US, 28% had
never worn high
heels and they had
3% problems. Of
the 72% who use
them, the wear and
tear was up to 33%.
To high heel devotees, Dr Annamalai, a consultant at Manipal Hospital,
tosses a painful, unattractive list of ailments -- bunions,
metatarsalgia, Hagland's deformity, tendonitis, sciatica,
back pain, degenerative joint disease, and even an altered gait. He points to one of those voluminous bibles
on orthopaedics, which says that high heels are 'a potential contributing factor for higher lifetime risk of osteoarthritis in women'.
But Dr Annamalai says that, "If you have to wear it
stretch your foot and calf muscles before and after, and
limit the height to no more than two inches."
Heels have a look-at-me effect that flats simply can't
conjure. Fashionistas say it extends the legs and lends
confidence. Simply put, it is sexy.
CHOICE FACTOR
Fashion guru Prasad Bidappa agrees that stilettos
make for a sexy silhouette,
but asks who is making all
these rules? Brogues or
Oxfords work well with business suits and complete the
professional look. "Maybe
for an evening out, but not
when you have to be active
for long periods of time," Bidappa says.
"Some women use heels
as an accessory," the style
guru notes, adding that they
can elevate an outfit from
average to elegant, which
gives them confidence for
that big meeting or interview. "But what you wear
has got to be a personal
choice. Enforcing a dress
code, where you hand
out the height of a heel, is
wrong." Bidappa says that
Roberts’ barefoot statement
is a rebellion against the
Cannes festival organisers,
who turned away women in
flats. “When someone like
Julia Roberts or Aishwarya
Rai says something, people
listen,” he says.
In India, high heels and stilettos are not an everyday
thing. But that is changing.
No surprise then that Abhishek Singhania, a dancer who likes to twist and
turn wearing pencil points,
picked the country’s IT capital for his first workshop on
walking in heels.
“High heels are never comfortable,” he says. “If you love
them, you find a way to go through the day.” ‘Love’, he
adds, is the magic trick to wearing high heels. “Heels,”
Singhania notes, “are a journey. They’re an art form.”
It may be all of that, but foremost it is a choice. Formal
clothes can be a requirement, but four inches of heel
that could also leave you crippled by middleage can’t
be. To suffer or not, should be a choice. A personal one.
35 | BOOM