Tanya Heath is on a double mission: to prove women can wear heels without ruining their feet, and that her answer to their plight, a heel that switches from high to low, can be made entirely in France.
The Paris-based Canadian started with a simple idea. When your shoes start to hurt -- half way through a party, a wedding or a workday -- press a button in the sole, slot out your dressy high heel and replace it with a walking version.
"You can do your two-hour meeting, and then you just take off your high heel," she explained at the Ethical Fashion Show in Paris this month. "You're getting relief -- and you're getting home."
So far so good, except the trick -- which no one had quite figured out until now -- is how to keep the shoe balanced and comfortable both on tip-toe and when you tilt it back to sit on a low heel.
Fruit of three painstaking years of research, Heath's patented answer to the riddle is billed as the world's first multi-height heel, a luxury leather shoe that switches seamlessly from 3.5 to 1.5 inches.
From pastel pink patent sandals to strappy dancing shoes or demure lace-ups, with either stiletto or chunky heels, high or low, the shoes are pitched at the high end of the market, starting at around $320 dollars.
With models harking back to the 1920s, Heath wanted a "deliberately nostalgic" style to offset the "gee-whizz technology".
通过使鞋的式样回归到20世纪20年代,海斯想要一种“刻意怀旧”的风格来衬托其“绝妙的技术”。
A passionate heel-wearer, Heath's project was born partly of personal experience, having suffered foot deformations from heels, like an estimated 38 percent of women worldwide.
"I had had enough of aching feet, and I refused point blank to wear ballerina flats," she joked. But she also wanted to show shoes could still be made in a high-cost economy like France.
In 1996, Heath left a job as policy analyst at the Canadian foreign ministry for a new life in Paris, following her oil executive fiance, a "camembert and champagne" lover who refused to be based anywhere else.