You can tell he loves her, his heel-wearing client: not just the great twinkly show-offs, Kylie, Madonna and Elizabeth H, but more serious women such as Isabelle Huppert, Diane Sawyer, Martha Stewart and Queen Rania of Jordan. “They all rock a 90mm-plus, at times,” says Cox. Oh, yes: “High heels are the holy grail of women’s footwear. Women just live for this stuff.”

A recent survey by Harper’s Bazaar found that 25% of women choose buying shoes over paying bills, and of the 1,000 women surveyed, 50% owned more than 30 pairs. It could be that they all have stout walking boots and a rainbow of ballet flats, though I doubt it. It’s a fair bet that many of those shoes will be impossibly high, impractical and uncomfortable.

I have a few pairs of flat shoes that I wear to protect my feet from the pavement and to get me from A to B. Then I have heels, loads of them, from fierce black stilettos to barely-there mules that make my feet look indecently naked. I wear them as much as is physically practical, which is as often as I can carry flip-flops in my handbag for ease of mobility.

Nicole Kidman, in the misery of her Cruise split, had one small comfort: “At least I can wear heels.” And members of the high-heels club knew what she meant. Women love their heels for all the otherworldly potential and excitement they hold. Heels take shorts from the boy scout and hand them to the v they transform heavy legs into a shapely turn; they complete an outfit. While clothes are an exhausting battle with body image, high heels only ever help — they are your own personal Photoshop. They give a woman height, authority and poise, and “can completely change the mood”, as Cox puts it. Thank God, and Manolo Blahnik, for the different and politically incorrect view of the world that killer heels offer women.

But first, a qualification: high heels are more than the natty collection of fun pumps and colourful mid-heels that Theresa May MP uses to brighten up a boring suit. To put a woman in a different light, heels need to be more than 3in. At this elevation, she is suffering, even if only a little, for the complicated returns she gets from wearing a high shoe. She’s made a choice to suffer for a change in height, posture and world-view.

The killer-heel wearer belongs to a small, rarefied club of women that love sex and glamour, are very fond of attention and are just a little, or a lot, vain and cocksure. The high heel is a look-at-me shoe. You don’t buy it because it is pretty, you buy it for its potency. Love them or hate them, Helmut Newton’s breathtaking Valkyries would have been impotent without their killer heels. They are an unequivocal, politically incorrect sexual statement.

But heels don’t necessarily objectify women. Some grown-up, serious types wear them. Condoleezza Rice chose a 3in heel to inspect the troops at Wiesbaden army airfield soon after she became Secretary of State. She looked pretty tough in her boots.

Tamara Mellon, a paid-up killer-heel wearer, agrees. Far from subjugating women, she says, heels “allow a woman to look a man in the eye”. In fact, some shoes are so high, they let you throw your arm over his shoulder in a proprietorial neck lock. Third-wave feminism indeed.

Unlike midriff-baring tops, hot pants and spray-on jeans, the heel is not purely the preserve of the sexually obvious female. One serious, beautifully dressed fortysomething woman, who works at Goldman Sachs for a healthy six-figure salary, says wearing heels taps a vein of sexual aggression in her. She loves heels in that typically female way, but she says she also hates them for bringing out the stereotypical City chick with balls. “Anyone who says heels make you vulnerable is wrong,” she says.

Likewise, a high-profile humanitarian cannot constantly engage in the politics of killing and torture. A friend of mine fell into a discussion with a glorious woman of this precise description. They both love Terry de Havilland, the grandfather of the vertiginous platformed wedge, and the maker of the shoe that even the heel veteran Kate Moss couldn’t get through Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara Ball without taking off. Even serious ladies will drop everything for their love of heels. Linda O’Keefe, in her book Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers and More, says: “Physically, it is impossible for a woman to cower in high heels. She is forced to take a stand, to strike a pose, because anatomically her centre of gravity has been displaced forward.”

When, in the mid-1990s, Germaine Greer claimed that the writer and critic Suzanne Moore could not really be called a feminist given her preference for “f***-me shoes”, I lost interest in the word feminism. Women who choose a killer heel over a sensible shoe enjoy mischief-making, political incorrectness, looking good in clothes and just a little personal torture. Are women like that not allowed to be feminists?

Why must everything in life be good, wholemeal, mid-heel and earnest if you are to be a respectable female? High heels may stand on un-PC ground, but we choose them knowingly and interpret them on our own terms by attaching them to our feet, making them an extension of us. The relationship a woman has with her heels comes from the same sickening lack of common sense displayed in a bad, but good, love affair. The pain, the suffering — the joy of living.

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