Does the Economy ACTUALLY Affect High Heel Height? Shoe Historian Reacts

You may have seen articles or videos making the rounds on this topic recently- such as ModernGurlz “how the economy affects the height of high heels“- and if you looked at them you may have also noticed they really don’t give much supporting research. Rather than take IBM at their word I decided to dig into whether the economic drops really do cause heel height to raise! Examples are EVERYWHERE if we just look at advertisements, articles, and originals from the 20th century. And the answer? Well, it’s not so simple as they’d like to say it is. High heels go up and down throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, constantly fluctuating to accommodate activities and careers, fashion and silhouette, and even technical achievements (we can only go so high before we need metal rods in our heels). Women in the 1910s and 1940s needed practical shoes for wartime work, as did women entering the office world in the 1980s. But that doesn’t mean we saw only low heeled shoes during those t