[HIGHLIGHTS] The first to wear heels were men in the 17th century: the true origins of an accessory that is a status symbol

Valerie Steele is the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. She has curated more than 25 exhibitions and published books on the history of fashion.

Steele selects about 400 pairs from the FIT collection (which totals around 5,000) to explain what we can learn about the world through them in Shoes AZ (Taschen) The heiress, fashion guru and renowned shoe lover Daphne Guinness maintains that “a shoe says more than a thousand words about the person who wears it”