Wallis Simpson, the American-born Duchess of Windsor, was the first woman to proclaim: “You can never be too rich, or too thin.” Now, one hundred and twelve years after her birth, abnormal psychology teaches that you can indeed be too thin. Better eat up if you want to avoid being stuck in a hospital bed with a food tube shoved through your nose. As for being too rich, Gatsby was shot in his own pool… and only three people attended his funeral. Of course, I realize that literary examples do not solidify an argument. I will even concede that all of abnormal psychology may be a sham—although I really should not have studied for that class last semester if that is the case. However, I still believe that the past century has proven that Simpson overlooked one thing women will never be able to get enough of: shoes.

I have to slide open my closet doors with great caution. I keep so many shoes inside that they occasionally work together and attempt to organize a mutiny. They attack me by toppling off the shelf. Shoebox lids fly off, and pointy heels shoot through the air. That’s my cue to close my eyes and shield my head. When all shoes hit the carpet, an observant viewer could examine my bedroom floor to understand my version of Simpson’s motto: “You can never bee too tall. Period.” I stand five feet nine inches tall. The average American woman is five and a half inches shorter than I am, but I love to wear high heels. People (whom I don’t know) often stop me on the street to ask, “Why do you wear heels when you are already so tall?” I ask them why they wear flats when they are already so short. Then I remind them that a woman can never be too tall, and I continue to stroll in a pair of five inch stilettos.

Walking in heels is a skill that must be acquired. Trust me—many people would have difficulty walking a mile in my shoes… especially the part of that mile consisting of bricks along Locust Walk. Those little gaps between bricks are incredibly scary to those of us on our fashionable stilts. But I don’t worry about it, because even the most experienced stiletto-wearers can run into difficulty while walking at slightly higher altitudes. In fact, Naomi Campbell was brought to her knees when she tripped and fell on the runway while wearing a pair of twelve inch high Vivienne Westwoods. So, never stress about that Locust Walk stumble… it could always be worse.

Everything that goes up must come down, and that fear of a tumble lurks in the back of all high heel wearers minds. So why do these shoes sell? Gillion Carrara, a professor in the fashion department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, reveals that strapping on high heels sets off a chain reaction: “The breasts go out; the derriere juts back; the leg elongates.” These needle-like stilettos I am so fond of can be traced back to the early 1950s, but humans have been standing on their toes since far before then. Greek actors raised themselves above mere mortal status by securing platforms to their feet. Queen Elizabeth I authorized a payment to her shoemaker for a “pair of Spanish leather shoes with high heels and arches.” The women in Spain and Italy wore elaborately decorated shoes, known as chopines, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the chopines could stand four or more inches off the ground, and many Venetian women needed to be supported by a group of servants to walk anywhere.

Heels sound painful. One curator at Correr Museum compares the people wearing such exquisite shoes to a person inventing a practical item, like toilet paper, only to embed it with bits of glass just to make it beautiful. A shoe historian (I just realized that such an occupation exists) believes, “It’s like the circus. You can learn to walk on anything if you put your mind to it.” Well, I put my mind to it. Some people believe that every shoe has a story. Shoes can reveal economic status, gender, ethnicity, religion, profession, and politics. Still, a shoe is only a shoe. But Manolo Bahnik reminds shoe wearers that something as simple as a shoe can “provide escape for the woman who wears it; if for only a few minutes it brings a bit of happiness to someone, well then perhaps it is something more than a shoe.”