Heel, girls!

Why do TV shows feature women in impossibly high heels when flats are all the rage in real life?

As I binged on the first three episodes of the new season of The Morning Show, I was struck by one thing. Every woman on the show was depicted in sky-high stilettos. Now I can understand on-air anchors (Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon) being portrayed wearing vertiginous heels but I have been around in enough TV studios to know that production staff — who are on their feet all day — tend to wear flats, or even sneakers, to get through their day. So, this struck a rather jarring note, to say the least, in a show that purported to show the real world of morning television. 

And after that, I could not stop noticing the incongruous use of stilettos in other shows as well. The new season of The Split — a British legal show set in a firm of family lawyers — had Nicola Walker wearing 5 inch heels as she teetered around her office, attended depositions, went to court, and then to dinner with her family. No woman could survive a day like that in those heels in real life. In fact, if you took a walk around the Inns of Court in London, you would be hard pressed to find a single female lawyer in heels like these. They know better than to wreck their knees and backs by balancing precariously on heels all day. 

Nearer home, there were the ladies of Four More Shots Please. Dressed in the height of fashion, they vamped it up for their poster wearing — yes, you’re right! — slinky stilettos. And yet, if you were to look at the demographic they represent, you will find that in real life they are more likely to be rocking Converse sneakers, ballet flats or even funky wedges. Stilettos are seen as being as stale as last week’s bread by this generation. 

In fact, one of the reasons why the new reboot of Sex and The City, called And Just Like That, was considered out of tune with the times was because Sarah Jessica Parker and her co-stars seemed to live in their stilettos as they traipsed through the streets of New York City. How very 1990s, they critics scoffed, surely the ladies should have embraced the Zeitgeist’s new-found love for flats by now? The fact that they were stuck in the fashion mores of the decade in which they came of age, aged them much more than the wrinkles they had Botoxed away. 

The truth of the matter is that stilettos have had their day. A small minority of women may still favour them — think Melania and Ivanka Trump — but for the most part, women have tired of their charms. These days Hollywood stars take pride in wearing comfortable footwear on the red carpet. Julia Roberts even famously went barefoot on the tapis rouge at the Cannes Film Festival, on protest at some women being denied entry in flats the previous year. 

It’s safe to say that Cannes won’t be repeating that mistake any time soon. And nor will female stars feel obliged to slip on a pair of stilettos to meet some unspoken standard of grooming. So why TV shows feel obliged to keep up the pretence of stilettos being integral to female glamour is, frankly, beyond me. 

The middle ages

Sometimes it is better to embrace the ageing process rather than fight it endlessly

 

If you have watched Mare of Easttown (and if you haven’t, well, what are you waiting for?) you will know that Kate Winslet has deglamorized herself completely to play the detective in the title. She barely wears any make-up, her hair looks as if it hasn’t seen a brush in days, her facial warts are completely visible, and her fashion sense doesn’t seem to extend beyond plaid shirts and hoodies (though she does clean up nicely for the occasional date).

 

Winslet says she was determined to portray a middle-aged woman as they really exist in real life – with broadening middles, less than luminescent complexions, and wrinkles that hint at a life lived fully. So much so that when the director of the show offered to edit her ‘bulgy’ bits in a sex scene, Winslet refused to let him do so. That was her body in her mid 40s. And she wasn’t going to pretend it was any different. 

 

The result is an authentic portrait of a woman in middle age: a little battered around the edges, a wee bit worse for wear, but magnificent in her authenticity. 

 

I couldn’t help but think of Winslet and Mare of Easttown as I sat through the Friends Reunion, laughing and crying in equal measure. Having grown up with Friends, I feel a sense of kinship with the leading ladies of the show. And watching them age from season one to season ten was one way of making peace with my own ageing process as I went from my 20s to my 30s and then my 40s. 

 

But the Reunion show came as a bit of jolt. Here were Rachel, Monica and Pheobe in their 50s, each of them presenting a different attitude to ageing. Lisa Kudrow appeared to have embraced the passage of time, making peace with the inevitable wrinkles around her eyes, mouth and neck. In contrast, Jennifer Aniston looked as if she had been frozen in her mid-30s. There were the odd signs of ageing – the cheeks were a little fuller, the jaw just a tad less defined – but other than that she still looked like the Rachel we remembered from the last season of Friends. 

 

And then, there was Courtney Cox. Except that she was less Monica Geller and more a cautionary tale of the dangers of too much Botox and way too many fillers. Her forehead was a frozen field, her cheeks were far too plump, and her lips looked almost unnatural in their fullness. It was hard to reconcile that face with the fresh-faced beauty that we had met and loved in Friends. And it was even harder not to wish that she had left her face well alone – or, at least, known when to stop. 

 

Gazing at Cox’s altered visage made me appreciate Sarah Jessica Parker more than I have ever done since the days of Sex And The City. In her latest TV series, Divorce, Parker looks like the best version of her middle-aged self. There is no attempt to hide the laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, her forehead crinkles up with disgust and anger ever so often, and her neck is lined like that of any other 50-something. But she still looks luminous, with sparkling eyes, springy hair, and a waistline that could give teenagers a run for their money. 

 

Of course, all these women have all the money, time, dermatologists and cosmetic surgeons in the world available to them, as they negotiate their middle ages in their own chosen way. But what about the rest of us, who barely have time (or frankly, the inclination) to exercise every day, to eat healthy at every meal, and spend every night rubbing anti-wrinkle cream into our faces and necks (never forget the neck!)?

 

Well, I guess we will just have to bid goodbye to our inner Monicas and Rachels and embrace the Pheobe within each of us. Let the wrinkles dance across our faces, telling the story of our tears and laughter. Let our waistlines expand in tribute to how much life we have tasted.

 

And let’s embrace our years instead of fighting to hide the marks they have left on us.