Last week I had to delay my trip to Paris for a few hours to sort out some delicate business. After a gruelling exchange, the main man in my life (at that moment) stared at me pitilessly and uttered the three words that you know are going to complicate things: No High Heels.

It’s not even as if I’m a hardcore heel-wearer. There are entire compartments of my life in which I happily exist in flats or wellingtons. But there are times when you have to look the business. And when you’re going to the Paris shows, looking the business currently requires towering footwear.

We could debate endlessly whether heels confer genuine power on a woman. The jury’s still out as to whether the American fashion editor who had to be escorted by two lackeys from her limo into a fashion show in New York because her shoes weren’t built for snowdrifts radiated omnipotence. What am I saying? At the time (three weeks ago), the jury was not out. The jury unanimously collapsed in helpless laughter and not a little embarrassment for its gender.

Then the jury pulled itself together and remembered that power comes in many forms and that, like the Venetian courtesans who wore 20cm chopines to keep their silk gowns out of the slime and also had to be supported on their daily perambulations by a brace of servants, that fashion editor was sending out all kinds of messages about status. Her job comes with a driver, assistants and the kind of salary that will keep her in footwear so luxurious and extravagant that their price and form are no longer necessarily required to have a correlation to one another.

Everyone seems to agree that heels are alluring, a signpost up the legs. The cover of an old book I recently came across called The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe (yes, really) by William A. Rossi shows a pair of shoes engaged in the closest shoes are ever going to get to sexual congress (male shoe on top).

But what else is a woman saying when she teeters and sways on her platforms? That she hasn’t had to compromise her femininity to become economically powerful? That she can withstand daily pain and is defiantly plucky in vile weather? That she likes looking men in the eye as opposed to gazing up at them? Or that she has a keenly developed sense of irony?

All that, probably. But the mass affirmation of the heel is starting to grate. Post Sex and the City, repeat buying of “sitting shoes” has become a bonding joke between women. It’s such a cliché.

During the past three or four years, fashion has developed an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with jacked-up heels. The higher they went, the more extreme the proportions could become. Puffballs, harems, super minis, pencil skirts, this season’s jogging-pant moment, volume ... it isn’t just that we’ve become used to looking at the female body on a pedestal, but that so many outfits now don’t work without heels.

I did as my osteopath told me and wore flat, sheepskin-lined biker boots because it was freezing, and velvet jeans because they were the only thing that worked and I galumphed. At the end of the first day, Net-a-porter.com’s Natalie Massenet asked me where my boots were from because she was thinking of stocking them . . . my back emitted smug signals.

The next day, I tried the heels. That subtle, high-stepping gait (maybe it’s not so subtle ) felt good — and more to the point, the rest of my wardrobe was back in service. As the day progressed, I could feel every tip-tap ricochet up my spine.

I write this lying on my bed, noting that Stella McCartney’s entire show was an ode to the kitten heel. Our wardrobes are on the turn.