There’s a scene from the 2023 film “Barbie” wherein arched ft step out of excessive heels onto the bottom. And keep arched. It took the actress Margot Robbie eight takes to excellent the trick and it set off a social media frenzy virtually akin to a collective gasp.
For a bunch of podiatrists in Melbourne, Australia, that scene turned fodder for a bunch chat — the angle of that arch, the load on the balls of her ft. When Barbie’s heels finally touched the bottom, these podiatrists noticed the beginnings of a analysis paper.
“We had been speaking about how good it was to lastly see Barbie in flat sneakers and to see Barbie making all of those completely different shoe selections primarily based on what she needed to do in her day,” Cylie Williams, a tutorial podiatrist at Monash College, mentioned in a cellphone interview.
It appeared, to the group of researchers, that Barbie’s empowerment was tied to the construction of her ft, in the identical means that the whole lot about Barbie — her physique form, her pores and skin coloration, her life-style selections — are tied to the Everywoman.
“We went, ‘Do you reckon that’s really a factor?’” Dr. Williams mentioned. “And we’re researchers — we’re curious — so we form of went, ‘Let’s take a look at this, this could possibly be enjoyable.’”
“Simply so we’re clear,” she added, “we’re critical researchers.”
Their curiosity has culminated in a brand new peer-reviewed research, published on Wednesday, that examines the correlation between Barbie’s foot posture and her social standing. It additionally examines, amusingly sufficient, the popularity of excessive heels in society.
Dr. Williams and two different podiatrists, together with a male colleague, Ian Griffiths, who refers to himself because the “range rent” of the group, teamed up with their pal — an occupational therapist, Suzanne Wakefield, who occurs to be a lifelong Barbie collector with a private assortment of about 800 dolls.
Collectively, they examined the ft of two,750 dolls that had been produced from 1959 to 2024. They measured every doll in opposition to a metric they’d devised: foot posture (flat or arched?), fairness (range of the doll), employment (is she a trend lady or a working lady?) and time (the discharge yr). Sure, the metric spells F.E.E.T.
“I wish to say one thing actually good about that however, you realize, it was Friday evening, we had been texting one another going, ‘We have to make one thing up that we are able to audit,’” Dr. Williams mentioned. Once they got here up with F.E.E.T., “we couldn’t have high-fived one another more durable if I attempted.”
The researchers discovered that, over time, Barbie’s ft did certainly undergo a revolution. Within the early a long time of Barbie’s life, one hundred pc of the dolls had arched ft. Within the final 4 years, solely 40 p.c did. “Employed” dolls had been much more prone to have flat ft, whereas fashion-focused ones had been extra prone to have the acute arch.
The researchers reiterated, within the interview and of their paper, that this proof didn’t decide cause-and-effect and, with a purpose to keep scientific independence, they didn’t contact Mattel to seek out out if the design determination had been intentional.
In a press release emailed to The New York Instances, Mattel confirmed that foot design was certainly a deliberate a part of Barbie’s evolution “with reimagined footwear choices to help Barbie’s daring steps ahead.”
“Barbie’s leisure selections have expanded,” Ms. Wakefield mentioned, sitting in entrance of her Barbie calendar, clutching her Barbie mug. “She was initially designed as a trend doll and so, if you happen to have a look at plenty of her selections of leisure, it was going to the opera, or it was having tea events or going to a ball. Now we see Barbie going snowboarding. I’ve obtained scuba diving Barbie — she does an entire lot of different issues that aren’t excessive heel-oriented in any respect.”
As girls entered the paid work pressure, excessive heels landed on the middle of “ongoing, by no means resolved questions of feminism,” mentioned Andi Zeisler, the creator of “We Had been Feminists As soon as: From Riot Grrrl to Cowl Lady, the Shopping for and Promoting of a Political Motion.” They’ve been perceived concurrently as objects that sexualized girls, significantly in male-dominated areas, and as symbols of energy that “telegraphed a way of objective and management.” They’ve been, over the a long time, abandoned by feminists, then reclaimed, then scapegoated by well being professionals as the foundation of all of the joint aches that ail girls, lending a sheen of science to the rejection of the footwear.
Whereas excessive heels will be painful, they may also be enjoyable and joyful expressions of character that don’t, in Dr. Williams’s eyes, deserve the destructive medical consideration. There isn’t any conclusive proof demonstrating that these sneakers trigger the widespread aches and pains related to them, Dr. Williams mentioned, and ladies needs to be free to decide on which footwear fits every state of affairs they discover themselves in, as Barbie does. “Well being care professionals have to shut up a bit bit extra,” she mentioned.
And she or he provided some recommendation: “If you wish to put on excessive heels, put on excessive heels.”