High heel shoes have quite a diverse and interesting history. They were actually first created as a rider’s boot because a normal flat footed shoe would always fall out of the stirrups and a high heeled shoe would be able to catch into the stirrups and ensure that the rider would not always fall off of the horse, but havsome sort of leverage when trying to stay on.





Even today, riding boots are still made this way with the higher heel and these are also the same as all cowboy boots that also have this look for the exact same reasons as cowboys also spend a great deal of time riding on horses and need the specialized shoes to ensure that they stay in place and have a good enough grip. In these earlier days, only men rode horses and so the shoes were only seen to be worn by males, and slowly this became a fashion statement, where more and more men would be seen wearing these riding boots, although they were not themselves riders at all.



Women started to wear high heel shoes in around the time of 1533, when the Duke of Orleans’s wife, who as extremely short in stature, asked a specialized cobbler to create some high heel shoes for her, so that she would seem a little taller in the company of others. This lady was very much in the public eye, so before long the fashion trend of women wearing high heel shoes took off, where many of these shoes were created for women to purchase wherever they could in all sorts of shoe stores. As time went on, men stopped wearing high heel shoes, and then it was just the women that wore them in all shapes and sizes as a fashion statement and to add to their overall sex appeal.