Walk this way? No thanks! Another Gaurdian post

Jess Cartner-Morley. Photograph: David Newby/Guardian

At the beginning, the point of shoes must have been to make walking easier - to protect delicate cavewoman skin from bits of rocks on the floor around the fire, and to help prevent broken bones if an ox trod on your toes by mistake. Something like that, anyway: I am a little out of my comfort zone on the historical detail front.

But somewhere in the past year or two, fashionable shoes have pretty much cut all remaining ties with their origins as practical footwear. Somewhere between the skyscraper high heel with too-small platform sole (as modelled by Gwyneth Paltrow), the heel-less stiletto (as worn by Victoria Beckham), the frankly dangerous velvet slipper-sandals that brought half of Prada's models tumbling to the floor last September, and the insanity of the open-toed, bare-ankled boot, shoes became mad. If you actually wanted to walk anywhere, most shoes featured in recent fashionmagazines would be far more a hindrance than a help.

The latest absurdity is the upside-down shoe. While a traditional shoe is sturdy on the base (for aforementioned skin-protection-from-rocks reasons) and relatively bare on top, the upside-down shoe reverses this: a slender heel and bare toe, with thick leather around the top of your foot and ankle where you don't need it. The point of this shoe is that it revels in its impracticality. You can't criticise it for being daft: that's the whole point. All you can do is hope that, fashion working as it does, the next step is the return of the sensible kitten heel.