Trying to design the hurt out of high heels

By Robin Givhan
The Washington Post

The Elisabeta shoe from the Oh! collection.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

NEW YORK — At the Prada emporium in SoHo, the fall shoes have arrived. There are "pony hair" pumps with a keen toe and a modest heel. There are other shoes that look easy enough to wear while navigating an urban obstacle course. But those are not the shoes drawing all the attention.

Prominently displayed next to the store's sweeping staircase is a pair of patchwork Mary Janes with a rounded toe and a four-inch block heel. They are a cacophonous mix of pink python, metallic gold calfskin and about four other shades and textures of leather. When a woman slips them on, her body pitches forward as if balanced on the edge of a precipice.

Another pair of shoes drawing coos of delight is a pump in gold and olive tweed decorated with a tiny purple velvet bow and a sunburst of richly hued crystals. The narrow, three-inch heel curves inward like the comma heel by celebrated designer Roger Vivier.

Such shoes are bad: They can wreak havoc on the knees, the back, the joints. High heels shift a woman's center of gravity, making her more likely to stumble. A woman cannot run in high heels, leaving her vulnerable.

Yet they push the pelvis forward and derriere back, forcing her to walk with a hip sway that society generally agrees is sexy.

The essential problem with high heels is impact. Because of the angle of the foot and the spindly heel, each footstep sends a shock wave through the body.

Information To read more, see insolia.com or ohshoes.com.

"It's like the karate punch. It doesn't have to hit hard, but it hits you fast," says Ray Fredericksen, who runs Sport Biomechanics, a Michigan consulting company that tests footwear for comfort and safety.

The "comfort shoe" market, which includes high-tech heels as well as flats, has been growing over the past few years and its customer base has been getting younger, according to Footwear News. Women spent more than $1 billion on comfort shoes last year, according to the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales.

Two enterprising companies are indicative of the newest high-heel cobblers.

Oh! shoes, based in Portland, is trying to slow the speed at which force is absorbed by the body. Insolia, in New Hampshire, focuses on designs that decrease the angle at which the foot rests in the shoe.

The idea for Insolia was born when a woman issued a challenge to her podiatrist, Howard Dananberg, who had dabbled in shoe construction. So, Mr. Bigshot, she said, make me a comfortable high heel.

	INSOLIA Insolia technology, meant to make shoes more comfortable, is used by the Amalfi brand. As an example of the cost, a pair of Amalfi pumps created for Nordstrom sells for $139.95.

"Is it possible?" Dananberg asked himself. "In the beginning, I thought no. ... But I didn't exactly know why heels hurt."

So Dananberg put on a tie — to look like a researcher rather than a lothario — and stood on a corner not far from Grand Central Terminal, and stopped women. "I said, 'Can I ask you a question about high heels?'

"There was a segment that said, 'If you touch my shoes, I'll kill you.' "

Finally, though, he learned that high heels mimic the dynamics of walking downhill. "When you stand in high heels, it's like a ramp. All the weight goes to the ball of the foot," he says.

A woman's pelvis — broader than a man's — helps to put a sway in her gait that allows her to negotiate high heels. "In-shoe" pressure testing helped Dananberg analyze how the foot bears weight inside a shoe. He began to wonder, "What if I shift the weight back and create a balance closer to 50-50? A balance like when you're wearing flats?"

Working out of his Bedford, N.H., office, Dananberg began bouncing ideas off people who worked in the footwear business when nearby Manchester was a shoe-manufacturing capital. They puttered with old lasts, modifying them, testing them and trying again.

Dananberg's secretary served as guinea pig. "I'd put it down and come back to it. It was expensive and I was funding it myself and I had to pay attention to my actual business," the doctor says. Finally, though, he felt he got it right. "This is not a pad," he says. "You can have heel height, pointed toes, all the looks. But no ankle instability. It balances your posture."

"And my wife always says, 'Tell how your butt doesn't get tired.' "

Insolia technology is currently used by the Amalfi brand. A pair of Amalfi pumps created for Nordstrom sells for $139.95.

Oh! is a line of shoes available for the fall, both online and at independent retailers.

The technology in Oh! shoes was developed by Mark Joseph, a self-taught product designer living in Aspen, Colo. Through his company, Comfort Products, Joseph has worked on ski boots to survival gear to Easy Spirit dress shoes.

To understand how to build a better set of heels, Joseph walked, if not a mile, at least a few blocks in a pair. He bought a few sets of size 11 two-inch heels.

"I was hobbled in about five minutes," Joseph says. "When I started to walk around in the shoes, I felt all the forces: the impact of the heel when it strikes, the leverage exerted to push the foot down toward the front of the shoe.

"It was such an eye-opener for me to put them on," Joseph says.

Joseph made several adjustments he can explain in great scientific detail — this, Joseph admits, is one of the company's marketing hurdles. Oh! shoes have a molded heel, an anatomically welcoming footbed and space-age this and that. Most important, Joseph inserted shock absorbers into the heel while increasing the shoe's side-to-side stability. The result is a shoe that gives the body a soft landing but doesn't wobble. And instead of stitching the shoe together by hand, Oh! relies on computer engineering for consistency.

Once Oh! had its first commercial line of shoes, Gary Wells, in charge of product development and a veteran of Nike and Cole Haan, sent them for testing to the Orthopedic Biomechanics Laboratories at Michigan State University.

Last year Fredericksen, the chief shoe analyst for Runner's World magazine, tested the Oh! shoes using machines and volunteers to measure flexibility, the energy expended walking in them, the force of impact on the body and stability.

Fredericksen has been in the business of biomechanics for 20 years and he has tested thousands of shoes. The Oh! shoes, in Fredericksen's estimation, did well.

"I was surprised to see them dampen or disperse the forces similar to the way an athletic shoe would," Fredericksen says, "not that I think you should run in high heels."

Insolia's technology can be incorporated into any style, but a manufacturer must tinker with the last. "When you get over three inches, it gets tough," Dananberg says. "As a podiatrist, I'm not recommending that. But I also understand the real attraction of heels to women."

Oh! is working on its aesthetics. Priced at just under $200, Oh! shoes are targeted toward "the professional working woman, lawyers, senators, bank executives," says Wells.

Still, the largest number of questions were fashion-related. "Most women in the [focus] groups were higher-end consumers. ... They considered the [Oh!] shoe more mature and tailored from where they were coming from," Wells says. As a result, "the spring line is much more contemporary and a little bit more fashionable."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More living headlines...