I recently spent a week watching women fall over. I didn’t plan to spend Paris fashion week that way but that is mostly how I remember it. At show after show, the moment that snagged in my mind, playing back on a loop, was a model losing her balance and toppling, or snapping a heel and stumbling, or having to kick off a pair of impossible shoes and hold them in her hand while walking the runway barefoot.
At Vivienne Westwood’s show, it was the exaggerated platforms that made the shoes impossible to walk in. A platform sole is a useful trick for adding height without tipping you forward at a vertiginous angle. But when there is more than an inch or two of platform, your connection with the ground disappears and you lose the instinct for which part of your foot needs to take your weight, for balance.
Stepping down from a platform, a willowy model tottered on one towering shoe, rocking in gentle circles like a skittle. For a moment she stilled, and then a Bambi leg crumpled beneath her as she hit the floor, just like Naomi Campbell famously did in 1993. One way or another, there were more falls than a Laurel and Hardy film.
