It's just a theory, but is the 120mm heel, as unleashed on the public a couple of years ago by Jimmy Choo, responsible for our current woes?

Think about it. Woman sees 120mm heel and is as ineluctably drawn to it as Eve was to that forerunner of the crunchy Braeburn. Woman buys heels, wears heels, looms over and emasculates all the men in her presence.

Said men feel deflated, demoralised and ultimately pointless, which drives them to take increasingly reckless risks in the oil/futures/thingy markets - and look where that's got us. Obviously I'd like to be scientific about this, but it's not easy when so much of current shoe mythology is just that: mythology.

But boy, that mythology is powerful. When historians review the early Noughties, they will conclude that 21st-century Woman teetered about her multitasks in 5in platforms like some cyber version of a foot-bound Chinese concubine. Every fashion spread, woman-centric film and chick-lit novel from the past few years has colluded in the notion that the modern woman turns to mush when confronted with a delectable pair of high shoes.

Arguably the past ten years of boom and more boom could be summed up by the phenomenon of the incredibly high, unimaginably extravagant shoe. The reality is murkier. My own indefatigable research on this subject finds that for every pair of killer heels one sees on the street, there are at least another 50 pairs of trainers, flip-flops, Uggs and ballet pumps.

In the dark recesses of their souls, designers know that most women are not prepared to hobble through life, just as they know that not every woman who buys their clothes is a size 8 Charlize Theron lookalike. That's why Lanvin's flatties do a roaring trade, despite costing £250 and up. It's also why most designers (including YSL, which offers a 75mm version of its famous 115mm Tribute style) have mid-heights in their selling collections.

And it's why some of the more fashion-forward members of the audience at the couture shows last month experimented with mid-height heels. Not that anyone calls them mid-height, because “mid” suggests moderation, and moderation is not what fashion is about just now. On the catwalks and in the shop windows it is all about the extreme heel, which in turn affects the proportions of the clothes, some of which won't work with flats.

“So,” I asked the head of the shoe design studio at Louis Vuitton in Paris recently, “when are you going to do a shoe for you know, wearing?” The slightly wounded reply was that if they had money for every time someone made a smart-aleck comment like that, they would be very rich indeed, but that actually, there were no plans to introduce lower heels in the foreseeable future.

It's pretty much the same story at other fashion shoes houses - officially, at least. “Our customer is a fashion customer” one PR said, implying that anyone not prepared to stagger through her day in 105mm has obviously given up the fight to look good. Another told me that their 35mm to 55mm heels were doing very nicely - with the “older” customer.

Great. Wanting a shoe you can walk in now categorises you as a geriatric. In some of the more fashionable stores, you actually have to ask to see a mid-height heel - they're not on display. Oh, the shame. Sidling into the adult section of the video store and asking to see the stuff with animals probably has more kudos.

“The simple fact,” Rupert Sanderson tells me on the phone from the shoe factory in Florence, “is that heels just look sexier, stronger and more arresting the higher they are. With the advent of the concealed platform, heels can be even higher. Technically, the sky's the limit. I keep doing lower heels, and some of them look quite strong - but the eye gets distracted. We're used to height.

“The other reason why designers still push the extreme heel is because that's what women come to us for. Practicality is what they go to the high street for.”

If there is a correlation between heel height and the national mood, it's not a straightforward one. In the Second World War, shoes were staggeringly frumpy, but that was more a question of what was available rather than mass psychology - the dream shoe of the 40s was a huge Ferragamo wedge. During the 70s, in the depths of three-day weeks, shoes were fabulously flamboyant. Now, we're seeing a massive uptake of flats (perhaps, after all, women are sick of buying shoes that sit unworn in their wardrobes), but also of the skyscraper heel.

“Women are looking to justify their expenditure,” explains Bridget Cosgrave, fashion director at Matches. “If they spend on a shoe, they want it to be something that can't be found on the high street.” The mid-height heel is an idea which dares not speak its name quite yet. But have faith - it will.

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