Young Brunette Girl With Red Heels Strips Her Pink Lingerie In The Studio

In 1533, after men had already started wearing heels again, the diminutive Italian wife of Henry II, King of France, Queen Catherine de' Medici, commissioned a cobbler to fashion her a pair of heels, both for fashion and to suggest greater height. They were an adaptation of chopines and pattens (elevated wooden soles with both heel and toe raised, not unlike modern platform shoes or clogs and sabots), intended to protect the feet of the wearer from dirt and mud; but unlike chopines, the heel was higher than the toe, and the "platform" was made to bend in the middle with the foot. That raised shoes had already been worn as a fashion statement in Italy, at least, is suggested by sumptuary laws in Venice that banned the wearing of chopine-style platform shoes as early as the 1430s.
High-heeled shoes quickly caught on with the fashion-conscious men and women of the French court and spread to pockets of nobility in other countries. The term well-heeled became synonymous with opulent wealth. Both men and women continued wearing heels as a matter of noble fashion throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the French Revolution drew near, in the late 18th century, the practice of wearing heels fell into decline in France due to its associations with wealth and aristocracy. Throughout most of the 19th century, flat shoes and sandals were usual for both sexes, but the heel resurfaced in fashion during the late 19th century, almost exclusively among women.