In 2007, a red-soled Victoria Beckham let rip on kitten heels. “Women see them as the wearable compromise to high heels,” she wrote in That Extra Half An Inch, a fashion memoir she would likely rather forget. “When in fact they have none of the benefits of high heels yet also none of the casual ease of flats. But most of all, they make your feet look bigger: they emphasize the feet by having them pointing down. There is nothing wrong with big feet but in this case they will look out of proportion to the rest of your body.” Fair enough: this was a period in time when the world’s most glamorous women were trotting about in vertiginous Saint Laurent Tributes and patent Louboutin Lady Peeps.
The cultural perception of nib-heeled steppers has, of course, softened since then. Early adopters began to rehabilitate the silhouette in 2019 via Ancuta Sarca, Balenciaga, and Christopher Kane as a sort of ironic embrace of ugliness. Then along came Knwls, Diesel, and Prada, until just about every other brand on the planet (including Victoria Beckham) started turning out diminutive stubs of their own. The resurgence hit its peak when Miu Miu’s fall 2023 kitten heels were named one of the most searched-for products on the Lyst Index–cementing its place in the mainstream–where it has henceforth remained. (This is what happens these days: nostalgia-based trends reemerge and stick.)
To wit: Hailey Bieber was photographed strolling through Los Angeles yesterday afternoon in a mocha-mousse (?) trench coat, wide-legged jeans, and The Row’s Liisas that reach no more than 1.4 inches above ground level. The heel is so small, so “nipple”-like, to quote Neverworns’s Liana Satenstein, that from certain angles, the shoe gives the impression of an elasticated ballet pump. “Despite its physical ridiculousness,” Satenstein wrote in a recent Substack post on the upward trend for downward heels, “I find the nipple heel even more bitchy than a kitten heel. The nipple heel is an I-gotcha-shoe, something to flick your nose at the discriminatory height rules of the Cannes Film Festival. It’s the lowest effort yet most statement-making heel.” Time to free the nipple (heel) in 2025.