Ballet flats
Not everyone was such a big fan of the stiletto. Just like Dior’s voluptuous, bell-shaped skirts, tall, thin heels drew criticism even at the height of their popularity. The New York Times ran an article on May 28, 1955, warning that “Posture Is Affected by Size of the Heels”; a Dr. Gerald Warner of Buffalo, New York, recommended that for the sake of their carriage, tall women should wear high heels, while short women should stick to low ones (questionable health advice that also managed to rob petite fashion fans of the chance for a little upward mobility). In a primer called The Essential Eve: A Guide to Women’s Perfection, one medical professional advised: “Excessively high heels will always be a source of danger to feet and eventually to health. Their habitual use causes the calf muscles to contract to such an extent that . . . it becomes almost impossible to walk.” Warner eschewed a bit of practical wisdom—still de rigueur to this day—that heel enthusiasts should sometimes give their feet a break, opting for sneakers or flats in order to be kind to one’s arches. “Above all,” he said, “women should wear the same size heels consistently.” Still, many women varied their heels as a practice. Saddle shoes and ballet flats were both popular styles, worn by the housewife during the day, to be swapped out for more flattering, feminine shoes when she heard her husband’s car in the driveway. Flat shoes were also particularly trendy among teenage girls, still on the cusp of sexual maturity and thus less restrained by the sartorial standards meant to visually define womanhood. The bobby-soxer—named for the way she rolled her socks down over her low-heeled Mary Janes or her two-toned saddle shoes—was often a doll-faced junior high school–aged girl in a poodle skirt. She was allowed to pine for, say, blue-eyed crooner Frank Sinatra precisely because her feelings were regarded as immature and therefore innocent: a freedom not afforded to a girl past a certain age, who could appreciate the implications of her sexual identity.
Young girls in the 1950s were groomed from an early age to want to grow up to be like their mothers. A 1955 ad for Esquire Lanol-White shoe polish shows a blond toddler with a string around her finger, as a “reminder to stock up on” their product as she balances in ankle socks and Mom’s white babydoll heels.* As they do today, merchandisers recognized in adolescents a generation of potential consumers who, if properly courted, would become loyal to their products for decades to come. One ad urging shoe manufacturers to advertise in Seventeen magazine relied on persuasive statistics collected from their own “College Freshman Survey”: “Cinderellas need no coaching when your ad’s in Seventeen, especially in August when 85% of Seventeen’s readers are shopping for back-to-school, off-to-college clothes. In fact, Seventeen’s readers alone spend $10,000,000 plus on shoes, buy 5.7 pairs each!” By stocking up on shoes and spending money—presumably earned at summertime or after-school jobs, or supplied courtesy of Daddy’s wallet—girls were rehearsing for a time when they’d be the primary shoppers for their own households.
But as much as advertisers wanted children to believe that shopping was deeply satisfying to their mothers—it wasn’t. To manage the stress of an unfulfilling routine, the stereotypical 1950s housewife took pills—downers, mostly—and smiled vacantly over her coffee cake, sleepwalking through Stepford days in order to silence the inner voice of dissent. But it wasn’t stifled forever; some children who grew up in nuclear families headed by two passively, yet undeniably unhappy, people chose to reject that life for themselves, moving to urban centers and seeking out alternatives—via music, poetry, and literature—to marital obedience. For the beatniks, style was an obvious manifestation of their counterculture ideals, a way of not only self-identifying as a group but also of rejecting the structured, starchy fashions so en vogue for their parents. Men grew out their beards, wore loose, untucked shirts, took to workingman fabrics like denim and, of course, European-influenced fashions like off-center berets and dark glasses. Women wore pants and dark, neutral colors that suggested they were absolutely not blossoming flowers, let their hair hang loose, and opted for flat, comfortable shoes that snubbed both America’s heightened consumerism and their mothers’ unappealing balancing acts. If “the girl with low / and sensible heels / is likely to pay / for her bed and meals”—as one Saturday Evening Post postscript warned—so be it. Beds and meals were bourgeois constructs anyway, far inferior to the pursuits of the mind.
Funny Face (1957), starring Audrey Hepburn as Jo Stockton, told the story of a mousy—and mouthy—Greenwich Village bookstore clerk turned reluctant It Girl model, after a demanding fashion magazine editor sends up a flare for a fresh face, and a photographer, played by Fred Astaire and based on industry legend Richard Avedon, identifies Jo as his muse. The plot was hardly beatnik-friendly; Jo stands by her philosophical beliefs and antifashion stance to a point but ultimately finds love with the older photographer after realizing that her academic idol is a cad. Jo remains a spark plug, but the gussied-up version of herself that appears in the last shot of the film in a New Look–influenced Hubert de Givenchy wedding gown is not quite faithful to the goals of the Beat Generation. She embraces her new life in the fashion world, and the audience (if they’re feeling cynical) can see the trajectory of her future play out: wife, mother, a prescription for barbiturates.
Still, the beatniks get the last laugh. Far more memorable than the gowns Jo modeled in the midst of her transformation is the outfit she wears her first night in Paris, to visit a café peopled with fellow “empathicalists” (the intellectual movement to which she’s passionately devoted). Audrey Hepburn, with her coltish figure and intelligent doe eyes, was an actress wildly unlike Marilyn Monroe. She was appealing for her brains, whereas Marilyn was all “brawn”; that Audrey was also gorgeous (and Marilyn reportedly smarter than most assume) is unimportant, because she was the thinking man’s ideal, while Marilyn, at times to her own disservice, got the audiences thinking with other body parts. Like Marilyn, Audrey also had a Cinderella-esque relationship with Salvatore Ferragamo, who created pairs of elegant, restrained, sensible shoes for her. Marilyn’s shoe size put her at the cusp of Ferragamo’s Venus, but Audrey was clearly an Aristocrat. At five foot seven, she was tall for a woman of her generation, with “long, slim” feet, which in Salvatore’s own words were “in perfect proportion to her height. She is a true artist and a true aristocrat. Audrey is always natural and completely unaffected, whether she is acting or buying shoes or handbags.” For Funny Face, he designed a pair of black suede slip-on loafers, to go with a Givenchy black turtleneck sweater and cropped black stovepipe pants. But when presented with the look’s pièce de résistance—a pair of spotless white socks—typically coolheaded Audrey balked. With boat-feet like hers, which she made an effort to camouflage—along with her unsightly, bony collarbone—how could she wear an outfit that all but drew two gleaming arrows toward her clunkers? It was bad enough that the self-conscious actress, who didn’t consider herself to be silver screen pretty, had to sing a duet with Fred Astaire about her “funny” face.
But on the question of the white socks, director Stanley Donen wouldn’t back down, and Audrey was a professional. In a dimly lit café, accompanied by a percussive jazz band and two French-looking male dancers (one in horizontal stripes, bien sur), she performed a three-minute-long dance sequence, to decidedly—and delightfully—unsexy effect. Using her long, slender limbs to make charming, awkwardly birdlike shapes, Audrey at once proved the full uninhibitedness of the character, as well as her willingness to pull no punches when it came to doing what was right for the film. Even Audrey was fond of her performance. After seeing the film for the first time, she wrote Stanley Donen a note: “You were right about the socks. Love, Audrey.”
If Marilyn’s signature shoe was the stiletto, Audrey’s most definitely became the flat. Marilyn was the consummate sex kitten; Audrey made a career of playing women who undergo a Cinderella-like transformation, whether it was from gamine to princess (Roman Holiday, 1953), chauffeur’s daughter to heartbreaker (Sabrina, 1954), simple farm girl to gal-about-town (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961), or cockney ragamuffin to lady (My Fair Lady, 1964). Aside from her natural elegance and camera-friendly good looks, her particular talent lay in treating those pretransformation characters with such delicate humanity that they were equally, if not more, charming than the versions they became on their way to happily ever after. Despite her aristocratic carriage, audiences almost preferred to see Audrey in a ponytail and flats, because hers was a relatable, mischievous presence, while Marilyn felt untouchable: the magnificent Hollywood goddess.
Soon after Funny Face, beatnik-inflected styles made it all the way into the vernacular of haute couture. In 1957, Yves Saint Laurent succeeded Christian Dior as the head of Dior’s eponymous fashion house. As the assistant to the legendary middle-aged designer, Saint Laurent had been tapped by the master himself, but no one, not least his mild-mannered, bespectacled protégé, expected Dior to drop dead of a heart attack less than one year later while vacationing in Italy. For his first collection as head of the revered—yet financially challenged, after a few too many years of coasting on the New Look’s success—fashion house in 1958, Saint Laurent unveiled a respectful variation on the New Look, featuring the trapeze dress: a high-necked, A-line, below-the-knee frock that was both innovative yet perfectly attuned to his mentor’s point of view. It put the House of Dior back in the black. However, just two years later Yves Saint Laurent stepped quite a bit further away from Dior with his “Beat Look”: a collection of turtlenecks and biker jackets inspired by the beatniks he observed drinking and smoking at the cafés in Paris and London. It was an early instance of street style affecting the world of high fashion, rather than vice versa, but Saint Laurent’s experiment, criticized by American Vogue as “designed for very young women . . . who are possessed of superb legs and slim, young, goddess figures,” cost him his job.
These midcentury pop-culture moments helped to establish a definitive dichotomy between high heels and flats, encoding stilettos as sexy, flirtatious, and feminine, and flats as quirky, intellectual, and unrestrained.* Flats became the purview of the alternative youth culture, which prided itself on rejecting the styles of the privileged mainstream. And indeed, the stiletto, for all its positive sexual, social, and economic connotations, lacked the cachet of the underdog, which is precisely where flats got their inimitable cool. The 1950s were a historically rigid decade that took a particularly black-and-white view of women. One could either be a lonely intellectual like Jo Stockton, or a vapid sexpot like The Girl—though in truth, most women were beleaguered housewives like Mrs. Richard Sherman. The question of whether one could be both an Audrey and a Marilyn didn’t emerge until the 1960s, when the sexuality of the stiletto and the practicality of the flat merged into a shoe that was made for flirting, butt kicking, and most important, walking.