I am 5ft 8 and have an obsession with shoes, nothing special, I’m only female, but it was only the other day that I found myself looking at a pair of heels sat in my bedroom that are in a pristine barely worn condition. I distinctly remember thinking ‘I can’t believe I haven’t worn these more, I don’t go out enough’. In fact, looking back, I go out plenty, but I NEVER chose to wear my ever expanding collection of nearly new 5inch heels, because I’ll be to tall, of course. Too tall? Is there such a thing. Super models tower over us on billboards and runways globally with a minimum height requirement of 5ft 8 at most agencies, and you would be hard up to find a show at fashion week without an eccentrically tall range of footwear on display. So why, when these shoes are brought out into the real world and worn by girls of the same height and shorter ( supermodels Kendall Jenner and Cara Delevigne stand at 5ft 10 and 5ft 9) we are considered too tall?

In fact, its a stigma imposed on height by the female population itself. In a study conducted by Rice University and the University of North Texas this year, it found that 13.5
% of men were concerned with dating women shorter than them whilst 48.9% of women wanted to date men taller than them. The reasons the women surveyed gave were reasons of ‘protection and femininity’, and at 1 inch smaller than the average man (5ft9), that doesn’t give me much wiggle room, or heel room so to speak (‘fortunately’ my boyfriend is 6ft).

When I go on a night out or to a party, wearing a pair of 5 inch heels like any other girl my age I of course get the  ‘you’re so tall’ or ‘how long are your legs’ comments. These are the sorts of things my friends say and let me be clear, they are in NO way said to criticise at all, in fact they’re compliments! But the stigma around height conjured up by some women allowed me never to see this before and create my own subconscious complex around my height. I know that this was not just the case with me, but another 5ft 8 friend of mine who had similar feelings – we’d always make a pact to wear heels together on nights out, so nobody was the tallest. But this image and the others in the series has made me feel absolutely ridiculous for even thinking there is a standard that I need to meet even in terms of how tall I am.

So, thank you Carol Rossetti, the wonderful illustrator who is the mastermind of this image and the others in this series, I wont ever take my metaphorical Louboutins off – I never liked kitten heels anyway.