Have you heard about the young woman who broke her ankle when her heel snapped, and successfully sued Dolcis for £7,000? The story grabbed our attention because there is nothing quite so frustrating as a broken heel. It always happens at the start of the evening, and only when heels are crucial to your look and without them — plodding around in your tights — you are just a squat blob. But also because the offending Dolcis shoes had 2½in heels — making them barely heels at all by contemporary standards.

This pair was 4½in and a half inches lower than the Giuseppe Zanottis that Gwyneth habitually wears to public engagements, and roughly 1½in lower than the average, go-anywhere heels of the moment. Compared with the fierce heels, scary dominatrix shoe-boots and solid-wood wedges that we have been learning to love, and almost walk in, for the past two years, the ankle-breakers were driving shoes. So, you can’t help thinking, this case sets a scary precedent for shoe designers. Particularly if you check out the AW08 collections now arriving in the shops.

If you haven’t had a glimpse yet, be afraid. This lot have folds of leather protruding from the back like giant chocolate shavings (Prada, of course), towering heels tooled like Mr Whippy cornets, and irregular, oozing platforms. You can no longer reasonably describe them as just shoes, because they aren’t made for walking (apart from being arch-crampingly high, they are often lead-heavy), and sure aren’t meant to add the finishing touch to an outfit.

Clothes, what clothes? These shout shoes are the main event, dictating their own terms and conditions. They require cunning accessorising (what we used to call dressing), and you need to plan your night around them to be sure your arrangements fit in with their demands. They snag your tights, wreck your calf muscles and make going to the loo down long flights of greasy stairs in restaurants absolutely terrifying. Plus, they cause unabashed rubber-necking wherever you go — and not necessarily in a good way. In a recent interview, the television presenter Mary Portas admitted that she thinks twice before turning up in the civilian world in her fashion heels: “I have to think, before I go to the children’s school, ‘Take the shoes off, Mary.’ There’s a place, a context.”

This, of course, is the point: shout shoes aren’t meant to fit in and make life easy, just like heels aren’t the most reliable form of transport. Dolcis girl was missing the point. When you put on a pair of heels, even medium-height, black peep-toes, you are volunteering for a certain amount of grief and discomfort — maybe even an ankle break, possibly a sprain or that crunching pain in the ball of your foot — in return for feeling bad, sexy, slightly out of control or all three. If you want to walk safe, there are trainers.

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