Should the idea of standing in a queue for two hours this Saturday for a ten-minute slot in the apocalyptic furnace that will be the Jimmy Choo at H&M experience seem strangely resistible, take heart. All is not — quite — lost. Admittedly, those cobalt metallic multistrap sandals are more than tempting, as are the Zebra-print strappies (£69.99) and the animal-print clutch (£79.99). But, while you would not necessarily deduce this from the excitement surrounding the H&M launch, there are other great-looking shoes on the high street, as shown here.

Note that I said great looking. I would be doing all of us a disservice if I pretended that a high street heel was an object of comfort, practicality or durability. But then the same could be said of many expensive pairs of heels, price being no guarantee of a perfectly balanced last.

These may be manufactured in Spain and the Far East (rather than Italy, which is still the cradle of perfection as far as leather goods are concerned). They certainly won’t be individually hand-finished. However if you’re looking for a quick hit of pleasure, a relatively inexpensive way to transform, modernise and otherwise breathe new life into an old outfit, as opposed to footwear designed for strenuous walking, the high street is not the slough of despondency it was until relatively recently.

I was reminded of this as I slumped on to a buttoned pouffe (buttoned, imagine) in the shoe department of the Oxford Circus branch of Topshop last weekend while all around me teenagers tried on decent approximations of Christian Louboutin’s ruffled peep toes, and YSL Tribute sandals. I would have tried them on too, but they didn’t have them in my size. Of course they didn’t. Anything good (still) sells out in a fortnight. But, at least at some point, they were there to sell out.

The A-Z of winter style rules

The Times fashion team lays down the law on the season’s latest trends, from bare legs to hair colour and coat lengths

BACKGROUND

• 14 hot high street heels

• Clothing solutions to give summer looks winter life

• Designers' autumn fashion picks

• The ten anti-trends for winter

BACKGROUND

• How to buy a winter coat

• Sex on legs: the best new tights

• Heels are dead — long live flats

• How to wear winter trends

Related Links

• The revenge of the sensible shoe

At the start of the Noughties, the idea that you’d want to queue for any high street shoes would have been outlandish. The stranglehold of the British Shoe Corporation, which owned most of the shoe chains meant that shoe shopping on a budget in the UK had a distinctly communist flavour. Didn’t like the cheap-looking white leather stilettos in Dolcis? Tough, because cheap white leather what was on offer in Saxone, too. And in Lilley & Skinner. As for getting your feet into a pair of affordable shoes that resembled anything seen on the catwalks? Only if you were prepared to wait a couple of years.

Jimmy Choo helped to spear a revolution that changed all that — not with its latest, budget-conscious incarnation, but years ago, with its unashamedly monomaniacal worship of the extravagant shoe.

Tamara Mellon, Jimmy Choo’s president and the woman who turned a small cottage industry into a global brand, can take some of the credit for alchemising the shoe into a totem of female success. Fabulously glamorous, it’s partly because of her high profile on the world’s social pages that Sex and the City picked up on the Choo name and made it synonymous with shoe.

It probably helped that Choo is as close a homophone to shoe as makes no difference (in certain accents at least). It also helped that accessories were generally on the rise, that women’s personal economic power was too, and that overt sexuality had never been so . . . overt.

Rail all you like against a culture that portrays women as collectively (tiresomely) shoe obsessed but the fruits of that culture can be seen on these pages. Relax, lighten up. It’s not all bad news.

Times recommends

• The Boxing Day tsunami: five years on
• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?