The Rise of Stilettos as Murder Weapons

When you think about the fact that the word stiletto means “little knife” in Italian, it’s unsurprising that women (and drag queens) have been using them as weapons since the shoe was invented in the 1950s. I mean, if you can’t dismantle patriarchy, you may as well stick a heel through its foot.

Knights and angry Italians

The stiletto blade was originally used by knights in the Middle Ages, who’d stick it through the armour of a wounded opponent to finish him off. Later Italian assassins would stick the blade up their cloak sleeves, in much the same way that female office workers now stick tampons up their sweaters so that Bob in Accounts doesn’t have to face the reality they bleed every month from their vaginas.

Later the Italians brought the stiletto knife to America, where it became associated with the notorious Black Hand extortion racket. Things got so bad that in 1879, the city of New Orleans outlawed their sale. Incidentally, members of the Black Hand used to sign blackmailing letters with crudely-drawn skulls and crossbones: very Alexander McQueen.

Stiletto, meet shoe

Unsurprisingly, the tapered killer heel was invented by a bunch of men. Elizabeth Semmelhack is senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and is the author of Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe. “Stilettos were invented in the 1950s by Andre Perugia,” she tells Broadly. “Later on Roger Vivier and Ferragamo began to play with the height and structure of the heel.”

Killer heels on the silver screen

In this vintage bitch fight between Dominique and Alexis from hit 1980s soap Dynasty, they start out with some well-aimed kicks to each other’s shins using the blunt force of their heels (more on this tactic later). I ask Semmelhack to situate the Dynasty model within the broader cultural history of stiletto-based violence.

“The Dynasty model was in direct contrast to the white collar worker, who was expected to wear low heels. Here’s the woman who’s actually changing power structures, and she’s dressing in a way that does not reflect Dynasty,” she explains. “The fears about women becoming successful corner office professionals; the underlying thought that women’s sexuality could potentially be uncontrollable; these are all played out in Dynasty after work hours. The idea’s that female cat fighting is going to disrupt the workplace. So the heels are higher, the hair’s bigger, everything’s exaggerated.”

In Hollywood films, where there’s an eyeball, there’s also someone waiting to skewer it like a melon-ball on a cocktail stick. The 1992 film Single White Female, Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) befriends Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda), starts impersonating her, sleeps with her fiancé, and eventually murders him with a well-aimed stiletto to the eye. If that’s not enough, she does it while wearing a bad wig and a silver metallic trench coat.

Offscreen murder and eyeball popping

Back to the real world, where smashing someone with your stiletto has long-term ramifications. One of the earliest cases of assault via high heel in the noughties was in 2006, when New York drag queen Flotilla DeBarge was arrested and charged with assaulting two people with her stilettos in a West Village nightclub.

Although several witnesses said DeBarge did not start the fight, the shoes were used as evidence in the case and she was sentenced to 45 days in New York’s Rikers Island jail. In 2011, Georgia woman Thelma Carter was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail after killing her boyfriend with a stiletto to the head.

More recently in the UK, a drunken fight between two friends on New Year’s Eve in 2013 turned ugly when 21-year old Melissa Causer stamped on Sophie Robinson’s face with her silver stiletto heel. She punctured her right eyeball and Robinson is now blind in one eye. Causer was sentenced to seven years in jail. Unsurprisingly, the two are no longer friends.

Photo by Studio Firma via Stocksy

Self-defence for stiletto wearers

Jennifer Cassetta is a grade-three level black belt who’s been teaching stiletto self-defence classes across the US since 2007. “I’d been training in a martial art called hapkido when I was assaulted on the street one night in NYC whilst wearing stilettos,” she says. She now helps other stiletto-wearers learn basic principles of self-defence.

“Right now as a culture we’re so unaware. We’re on our phones, we’re texting constantly, we’re just not present. And the world is getting crazy—just look at those attacks in Cologne. If you’re going to be out in those wobbly, unbalanced things then you better know how to defend yourself, because you sure can’t run in them. They hurt like hell.”

Cassetta is a firm advocate of the stiletto as a weapon. “One of the benefit of wearing stilettos is that if you’re pushed to the ground, you can kick to the shin. That hurts big time. Or if your attacker is trying to get on top of you, kicking to the groin with a stiletto is a good approach. If you can slide it into your hand, now you have a tiny knife to slice someone in the eye with. Wonderful.”

A high-heeled terror threat

After 9/11 there was discussion of whether women should wear stilettos in the workplace at all, as they would make it difficult to run away from terrorist attacks. Manolo Blahnik was even forced to withdraw a pair of titanium stilettos with a 3mm-wide heel after fears they could be used as a weapon or set off alarms at airports. Thankfully, to this day no one has ever attempted to hijack a commercial airliner using a pair of $600 heels.

For Semmelhack, fears about office workers being able to escape terrorists feed into a broader cultural narrative about the gendering of stilettos in our society. “High heels have a meaning related to social power,” she explains, “but stilettos are physically disempowering. When a woman says she feels empowered wearing a pair of stilettos, it doesn’t mean she’s empowered in the face of crime or a terrorist attack. It means she feels empowered vis-à-vis social relations.

“Shoes aren’t a flippant, fun thing. They’re central to politics going on today. As women become more powerful, perhaps stilettos will become symbols of real power, not sexual availability. And if the day comes when real gender equity is on the horizon, then men will be happy to wear them too.”