A girl was walking on the wet road wearing platform shoes

They say history repeats itself, and keeping pace with the world means preparing for the return of its eccentricities. Walking through the rain-slicked streets of Shinjuku, I bore witness to a ghost from the past, resurrected and walking the asphalt: the platform shoe. Directly ahead of me, a young woman was putting one precarious foot in front of the other, navigating the city in towering white soles that seemed entirely hostile to the human anatomy. Yet, she marched on with absolute nonchalance.

The lineage of this particular footwear is as absurd as it is fascinating. In 16th-century Venice, noblewomen wore chopines—monstrously high platform stilts designed to keep the hems of their opulent gowns from dragging through the mire of the lagoon city. Centuries later, and thousands of miles away, the same impractical silhouette bubbles back to the surface of contemporary Tokyo, repurposed not to defy mud, but to court fashion. It is a strange, cyclical comedy.

But while the chopine sought utility, its modern descendant offers only a liability. Looking down at the street, the pavement gleamed with a fresh coat of rainwater, transforming the asphalt into a slick, treacherous mirror. To traverse such a surface on what amounts to high wooden blocks is to invite disaster; one misstep, and the laws of physics will inevitably claim a dignity, if not an ankle. During the previous boom in the 1990s, the youth of Tokyo suffered a collective epidemic of sprains, tumbling down station staircases and tripping over curbs. Orthopedic clinics, I am told, enjoyed an unprecedented golden age. As someone entirely detached from the dictates of haute couture, I find myself plagued by an uninvited anxiety for the orthopedic welfare of strangers. Must we really enter another era of collective suspense?

Unbothered by my silent fretting, the girl beneath the pink umbrella maintained her brisk, unyielding stride. An oversized, ruffled tote bag hung from her shoulder as she glided across the pedestrian crossing, a small white stuffed rabbit dangling from the strap, swaying helplessly with every step.

Perhaps the pursuit of style is far more grueling than the uninitiated will ever understand—a secular asceticism where beauty demands a quiet acceptance of pain. I could only watch her disappear into the Shinjuku crowd, offering a detached, cynical prayer that she wouldn't lose her footing on the next manhole cover.

Shinjuku on Google Map

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