Are stilettos appropriate office wear?

Stilettos are normally long thin high heel shoes, which are predominantly feminine.

Stilettos have been around for quite a long time. This style dates back in the 16^th century where men’s foot wear comprised of the Near Eastern heel, which was later on in the 18^th century abandoned, leaving women to take it up and made it more feminine. These types of heels would later become a way through which women would express their decorous femininity. Moreover, the stilettos gained popularity especially in the 1950s because they would give women an optical impression of a longer, slimmer leg with a smaller foot and a general greater height.

However, as time elapsed, stilettos become more popular for their sexy nature rather than their ability to give an illusion of height. Most women who wore stilettos in the 18^th and early 19^th century would be regarded as femme fatale.

To date, stilettos are the most common fetish item, because they are regarded as a seductive form of clothing. This is because they modify the wearer’s walking style and posture, flexing the calf muscles thus making the buttocks and bust more prominent. For this reason, in the 1980s, most of the ladies who occupied powerful positions in institutions shied away from stilettos and instead opted for the low heeled footwear.

However, in the early 2000s, the stiletto became very popular as part of office wear styles; particularly by young women who wanted to give masculine or casual outfits a feminine touch. This was even accentuated to a greater scale when the fashion power houses coined the stilettos as the new form of power dressing, implying that being business savvy was not sufficient to be successful.

Currently, in Kenya, numerous professional women adorn stilettos as part of their office outfit. However, not all institutions permit women to wear stilettos at work. Most of such institutions have come up with such flimsy reasons like the distraction of other employees because of the loud click sound they make when one is walking.

There are still some chauvinistic men who have kept on holding on to the thought of stilettos being unfit for office wear. With some of them being brutally honest that that kind of dressing is erotic…and distracts them from being productive at work.

Unfortunately women have not been able to have their fair share of footing compared to men because even when one goes up the corporate ladder, they are still faced with the hard task of explaining the complex meanings that the high heels convey. Hopefully, sometime in the future women and men alike will fully embrace stilettos as office wear.