Women were not privy to the new belief that all men should be given an education as they were seen as emotional, sentimental and un-educatable’, so they were left to enjoy aesthetic pleasure as much as they pleased. Heels only fell out of favour with men due to the afore-mentioned shifts in social ideology. In this time, women were donning heels, smoking pipes, cutting their hair and wearing masculine hats. Heels were soon adopted by aristocrats who thought it gave them a virile, powerful edge then became adopted by women because of a trend to look more masculine around the 1630s. An example of this is heeled shoes which were actually originally worn by men from the Middle East due to their suitability for riding.
He argues this is because there was a profound reorganisation of masculinity during the political and economic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Flügel found contemporary European clothing seemed to be out of keeping with what normally occurs in nature where the male ‘is more ornamental than the female’. For contemporary males, it may be a given that an elaborate, extravagant dress has always been merely “a female thing” but evidently that is untrue. This included the abandonment of bright colours, loud patterns, high heels, shiny accessories and any other types of ostentatious adornment. According to Flugel, ‘fashion is one of the best indicators of social, ideological and political change’ and The Great Masculine Renunciation ‘occurred around the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth’, was a movement in which ‘man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful… henceforth aimed at being only useful’. As these new ideals permeated society, ‘the decadent dress of the ancien régime fell out of fashion’. Which exported new social ideals of meritocracy over inherited privilege, and equality over steep economic disparity, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.
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