Strange Arches: The Murky Origins of the High-Heel Chair †

Architectural Digest
2022

In Brentwood, Los Angeles, a family home enshrouds a storied time capsule. Like other famed archeological sites—the 5th dynasty tomb of Egyptian nobleman Khewj, or the bedizened insides of a ceremonial chariot recently unearthed outside Pompeii—the teenage bedroom of former MTV reality star Whitney Port (The Hills, The City, The Hills: New Beginnings) has been near-hermetically sealed since she vacated it, carefully preserved down to the leopard print molding, hand-painted by her mother. The room is a leopard-and-fuschia paean to a certain slice of early 2000s LA girlhood. Its construction was a labor of love, paid for in part by Port’s parents and subsidized by paychecks from her first job (gift-wrapping at the local mall). There’s a canopy bed bordered by hot pink curtains; a bubblegum-hued feather boa twisted around a lamp stand; glossy black drawers lined with leopard print; flooring that mimics wood chips.

“You know when you go to a saloon-themed restaurant and there’s sawdust all over the floor?” Whitney asks over the phone. “Well, we used to go to this BBQ spot in the Valley, and I loved how it looked, so I searched for a sawdust-style floor with my mom.”

The den is immortalized in a YouTube video uploaded by Whitney in December 2020, where she and her husband react to a Cribs-style tour that a much younger, shyer Whitney exclusively gave to MTV. Though I’m admittedly intrigued by her expansive glass shoe collection, another piece of faux footwear bewitched me. Sitting before the dresser vanity was a cyclopean high heel, recast as a chair, its riotous upholstery (patent pink insole, a wild cat’s rosettes) vibrating in the fuzzy glow of an old VHS. “I must have seen it on TV, or had some pop-culture reference,” she tells me. “I remember trying to find a shoe-chair that fit my palette for a while. None of my friends had one. My mom and I used to go antiquing a lot, and we bought it at a random furniture store on Robertson [Boulevard]. I thought it was very sophisticated and glamorous.”

Scour the margins of Y2K-revival TikTok for long enough and you’ll likely spy heel-shaped chairs—like Whitney’s—exalted as historic effigies of ugly-beauty. (Whitney believes her mom “would never get rid of the shoe chair, but if she did, I’d put it in storage and save it.”) The user @bimbocouturee spotlights them in a slideshow titled “my fav trashy things of the 2000s xx,” appropriately soundtracked with the Pussycat Dolls’ 2008 bop “When I Grow Up.” In other clips the chair is a bedroom centerpiece, a campy object to straddle before the ring light’s unholy glare. This new generation of owners might be stoopingtheir pieces, or combing Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for secondhand fare, but there’s also an explosion of the product at mass retailers: Amazon, Wayfair, Sears, and Alibaba currently stock near-identical silhouettes. At Walmart right now, you can buy a generic-brand faux-leather stiletto chair, studded with crystals like a Von Dutch Chesterfield, or a so-called Patriotic version in red, white, and blue. On the janky website FunkySofa.com, customers can even customize upholstery: plush and crushed velvets in a variety of shades, faux leathers, and a range of animal prints under the collection “LA Zoo.”

This June, the New York–based creative studio Pink Essay uploaded a carousel of plush stiletto chairs to Instagram, sheathed in lime green and muted silver and purple leopard print. When asked why they’ve been top of mind lately, founder David Eardley confirmed that the appeal is partly nostalgic; they function as a sign, an associative portal. One glimpse and he’s catapulted inside the television sets of his childhood: the motley, caricatural rooms of Blues Clues; the hard-candy palette of ’90s Nickelodeon. Though he’s unsure where the shoe-seat originated, Eardley finds its brashness refreshing, a rebuttal to the prosaic West Elm–ification of interiors: “In a world of sleek, purposefully unobtrusive furniture—the Togo, the Kagan sofa—the in-your-face rebelliousness of the high-heel chair demands joy, irreverence, and individuality.”

While Eardley is personally intrigued by shoe-chair hybrids—deeming them “a rejection of the dichotomy that design should be both serious and exclusive”—he admits that they’re not conversation fodder amongst his industry peers. Instead, “It’s the ethos behind them, and other similarly absurdist pieces of furniture.” This omission isn’t unusual. For decades, the chair has sat firmly outside the realm of what we might dub Serious Novelty, an object of some disdain. No matter how widespread its silhouette, or trend-adjacent its near-anthropomorphism, it’s never been embraced in the manner of other figurative furnishings such as Dali’s Mae West Lips Sofa, Pedro Freideberg’s Hand Chair, Gaetano Pesce’s Up7, or Frank Oelke’s Pedus bed shaped like two gargantuan feet.

Pinterest boards dedicated to heel chairs—including dupes sporting logos of Adidas and Chanel—confirm their status as awkward pageant pieces. In image after image, they appear as surrogate objects, fantasies incongruous with their surroundings. I’ve seen them in living rooms with naked walls and popcorn ceilings, the sparse lobbies and hallways of business parks, in cluttered closets, dorm rooms, and traditionally feminine-coded sites of transformation: nail salons, bridal stores. On Twitter, they often appear in the dim sets of amateur porn (the top result features a threesome atop one), where their bright upholstery thrums against quivering flesh and bare walls. Scrolling through hundreds of images, I’ve marveled at how flexile the form is: how glamorous and cheap, sensuous and seedy, how equally at home it appears in a sparkling, vacant McMansion and beside J.Lo, giving an onstage lap dance at Madison Square Garden, as it does abandoned in a dumpster, wet and cruddy, redolent of a hard-boiled detective novel.

Here’s my theory for the design’s outsider status: There is no clearly documented provenance, no cult object from which the infinite “copies” might stem. Though the history of high heels is well established—beginning with Persian cavalry in the 10th century—their chair descendent draws blanks. While I spoke with multiple curators and furniture historians for this piece, none could pinpoint who had made the first heel chair or when it originally debuted into society. Its archetypal profile—thick heeled, high backed, often incorporating a clandestine storage space, clunky overall, but slim enough along the sole to cause discomfort after long sittings—seemed to have sprung from a vacuum. Except, of course, it couldn’t have.

SURREALIST BEGINNINGS

Reappropriated heels (ur-heels as absurdist art objects) likely first emerged back in the 1930s with the surrealists. Seeking to overcome what writer Andre Breton called the “crisis of the object,” artists employed strategies of deliberate estrangement, placing objects in unfamiliar contexts to spawn new subconscious associations. In the early ’30s, Salvador Dali produced a number of shoe assemblages, which critic Dawn Ades deemed erotic: “like a compendium of sexual references running from fetishism to pornography.” Designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s winter ’37–’38 collection included a high-heel hat, made with Dali and referencing childhood dress-ups. (In a then radical gesture, a black heel was flipped, its opening placed over a model’s head.) A few years earlier, in his painting Woman with a Head of Roses (1935), Dali planted a spindly, gilded chair in the foreground, its curves mimicking the human body, its legs finished with four gold high heels. (This would eventually manifest as the three-dimensional Leda chair.)

Also dated to the 1930s: a courtly, flouncy shoe-chair whittled from pine and sold on 1stDibs. There’s little context, except that it’s Italian-made, with no attributed designer. Amid sparse early references, it suggests another possible origin point, reminiscent, as it is, of an advertising prop—the kind of thing an entrepreneurial cobbler might install in their window. (Emily Orr, a curator at Cooper Hewitt and author of Designing the Department Store, couldn’t confirm if this listing was indeed once a retail display piece, but said that “cobblers would have put regular-size individual shoes in windows since the late 18th century.”)

It’s not hard to see the symbolist appeal of heels for early surrealists and later artists—like Birgit Jürgenssen, whose 1974 [Shoe Chair], with its reign-like leather straps, suggests sexual powerplay, or Anthony Redmile, whose fiberglass Body Chair (1975) spreads its front legs wide, a provocation. More recently, there’s Anna Aagaard Jensen’s The Grand Lady (2018), whose outstretched legs, in pink high-heels, are also colored with MAC blush. Chairs themselves already infer echoes of the human body; coupled with the motif of a high heel—a tool for elevation and elongation—symbolic potential abounds. The heel is a container of meaning, variously inferring girlish sweetness, naivete, artifice, and decadence. It is a makeshift weapon, its bladed heel narrowing at the tip. It nods to constructed and material desires (see Moschino x Gufram’s gold-plated heel chair).

The heel itself speaks to aggressive sexuality, deformed pleasure, phallic power, and gendered performance. Architectural and column-like, it infers both weight-bearing strength and teetering vulnerability. On that note: According to Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Cooper Hewitt’s curator of contemporary design, high heels were once a metaphor for fertility, appearing as a structural design in 19th century nursery rhymes—think The Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe. “Superstition led infertile women to wear the shoes of women who had given birth to incite fertility,” she says. “Perhaps an influence on depictions of cherubs or babies sitting in shoes that you see on 19th-century porcelains.”

OH, CANADA!

As a hodgepodge timeline of the heel chair came together, I noted one gaping hole. No designer-credited chair resembled Whitney’s version, the one that is everywhere: a big upholstered shoe. Soon enough though, a name began popping up on auction records, sometimes misspelled and attached to pieces from as far back as 1975: David Burry, founder of Design Emphasis. Despite the convincing evidence, Burry was surprised to hear from me in this context. His company has designed and manufactured furniture in Montreal since 1987, and he insists that “you won’t find any upholstered shoe chairs until after 1996. Mine were the absolute first.” Burry told me many online listings were dupes—even those at reputable auction houses—falsely predating his mid-90s designs to profit off his name. “I learned long ago not to let the knockoffs bother me,” he adds. “It’s almost embarrassing when I have to admit to being the father of this phenomenon. But at least I have a real claim to some kind of fame!”

It all began, Burry says, with a dinner party at his home, where conversation turned to strategizing his next design move. He’d been making concept seating at trade shows as a PR gambit: folding sofas that, when closed, impersonated gigantic handbags; a hamburger-shaped ottoman and a hot dog couch; a modular arrangement mimicking a swimming pool with floating beach ball. One guest brought up Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), which she’d recently seen, where “there’s a large shoe on top of a bus one of the drag queens sits on.” His guests agreed that the jumbo, glittery piece would look great in upholstery. By noon the next day, Burry had a completed prototype: “A pink moire Marabou mule with black ostrich feather on the toe.”

Design Emphasis began producing heel chairs and they were an instant hit. A few weeks later, in the spring of ’96 or ’97, Burry exhibited them at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair. “Big mistake,” he laments. “Everyone loved them. Two weeks later l showed them in a Las Vegas furniture show—there were three other companies showing them. When l approached them about copying, they each claimed them as their own original designs, which is why I feel uncomfortable talking about the fact I’m the originator. I suppose I should have registered the design, but I had no idea they’d be such a hit.”

Burry still holds on to a few high-quality images of his earliest chairs: a full-page feature in an October 1997 issue of InStyle (which mentions their inclusion in MTV’s The Real World Boston set), and pages from a ’90s Design Emphasis catalog. There, among the huge hot dogs and puffy fries, are a pair of black and white cheetah print high-heel chairs, their curves subtler and more organic than the clunky, squared-off forms I’d seen on sidewalks and across the internet—though those still had a certain charm for me. Each was bench-made (by hand), with plump cushioning and piped edges, taking around six hours. At the time, he sold them for $1,200 a piece. They were a purist shoe and nothing else—Burry never added storage compartments. “The knockoffs usually sold for just over $100,” he recalls. “I couldn’t compete. But the one thing that always amazed me is why the copies are so bad! My original is sensuous and sexy. A real ‘come F me’ pump!”

A HEELED RESURGENCE

Fast-forward a few decades from Burry’s upholstered shoe debut, to a recent balmy night in Brooklyn, New York. Katie Harless, a freelance photographer and artist, was walking home when she noticed a pillowy form of freak proportions. Right there on the sidewalk, parked between a beat-up wicker basket and a telephone pole, was a stiletto seat shrouded in leopard print and velvety black, its vertiginous heel angled inward, as though about to snap. “I sent a photo of it to my friend Allison, because it reminded me of her,” says Katie. “‘She replied, ‘LMAO bitch, I literally own one!’ So I had to go back and get it for myself. I called an Uber and squeezed in the back seat with it. The driver thought it was hilarious—he said I should try to sell it—but I knew it belonged in my home.”

Katie, who has a penchant for “funky home items,” says the pump reminded her, stylistically, of Bratz: the big-headed, svelte-bodied “bratty teen” dolls popularized in the early 2000s, plastic incarnations of the era’s bedazzled hedonism. Incidentally, she was right: Bratz released their own faux-fur “High Heel Hot Seat” in the 2003 Funky Fashion Furniture playset, and the form makes cameos in other candied play-realms, its shrunken, dollhouse proportions adding a second distortive layer. There are animal-print iterations in Barbie’s 2003 and 2004 Lounge Kitties collections, an aubergine-colored plastic heel seat in Barbie’s 2008 Hannah Montana Malibu Beach House, and hot pink versions in the touring Barbie Dreamhouse Experience. In Katie’s apartment, the heel is similarly cast: more theatrical, tawdry set piece than site of rest. When it’s not a prop for photo shoots, or making cameos on her TikTok, it hosts her full-size replica human skeleton.

Anthony Barziulay Freund, editorial director at 1stDibs, suggests that—beyond millennial nostalgia or Y2K trend boards—the latest groundswell embrace of prodigious pumps could align with shifting tastes of the COVID era. In recent years, the site has tracked increased demand for puckish conversation pieces: Seletti lipstick mirrors, the Gufram cactus coat rack, everything Piero Fornasetti. (According to their data, searches containing “cactus coat,” “gufram coat,” and “gufram cactus” are up 55% year-on-year.) “We’ve certainly noticed a spike in pieces that have attitude: playful, self-referential, even slightly naughty or audacious,” Freund shares in an email. “The pandemic-forced focus on our interior spaces has also meant that we’re asking more of the things we live with, that they tell stories about themselves (their history, makers, provenance) and also about us.”

If we want the furniture we live with to function as a funhouse mirror—to reveal some part of ourselves or its maker—the seat’s appeal checks out. Sure, copies from faceless manufacturers abound, but in form alone the chair evokes sociability (a dress code, an event) and a human wearer: their ankle and achilles, their toes. Glenn Adamson, a curator, writer, and historian, believes this resurgence in the figurative in design might connect not only to the influence of contemporaneous fine art (“Figuration is very much back in vogue in painting, for example”), but to digital culture, and the ways we now converse. “Could the shoe chair be conceptually related to a shoe emoji?” Glenn asks. “I feel like there is a parallel with pop happening now, in that the concise, easily digested image has a kind of currency but also complexity. It’s interesting to me that emojis function almost like the phonemes of a language.”

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