The Kitten Heel

The kitten heel is a small shoe with a slightly cheeky name. It's a heel of only about an inch and a half to two inches, thin and often slightly curved or set in from the back of the shoe, so it has the elegant, tapered look of a stiletto without the height.

It appeared in the second half of the 1950s, once the technology behind the stiletto - a slim heel with a metal core - had made thin heels practical at any height. Its first big market was teenage girls. In the 1950s, wearing high heels was a clear marker of adulthood, and a young girl moving from flat school shoes to grown-up heels needed a gentle step up. The kitten heel was sometimes called a "trainer heel" for exactly that reason: a heel you could learn to walk in. That links it to the new teen fashion market, which was keen to sell girls their own grown-up-but-not-too-grown-up clothes.

It quickly became popular with adult women too. Kitten heels were comfortable enough to wear all day, were less notorious for damaging floors than stilettos, and still looked refined and feminine. They were especially popular in pointed-toe pumps, which were fashionable in the late 1950s, and they suited the new, looser dress shapes of the end of the decade - the sack dress and the trapeze line - which had a younger, more relaxed attitude than the tight wiggle dress. Audrey Hepburn often wore low heels as part of her understated style, which helped the look's reputation for effortless elegance.

I think the kitten heel is a lovely example of a compromise that became a style in its own right. It sat in between the youthful ballet flat and the adult, seductive stiletto, and it offered women a middle path: polished but practical. It stayed popular into the early 1960s, and it has come back again and again - usually at exactly the moments when fashion wants to look grown-up and elegant without being uncomfortable.