[defrost]

The physical world stiletto shoe challenge rests on the engineering of the "shank and heel" piece, the actual heel and the weight supporting shank that arcs under the foot between the in and outsole.

These can be steel, titanium, thick plastic, etc. The integrity and trustworthiness of the stiletto relies on these often very thin pieces staying undeformed and rigid wrt each other despite human mass scale forces bending, twisting, rolling and threatening to break the heel and shank join.

[swiftcoder]

The other (often neglected) challenge is having flooring materials that stand up to a few million pascals of pressure concentrated under that tiny heel. They'll often punch holes right through pre-war parquet flooring, or the bottom of a small wooden boat - yachtsman watch for stilettos like hawks

[addaon]

Yeah, this is a major design point for commercial aircraft interiors, and handling the point loads often favors materials like foam-core composites that usually lose out to e.g. honeycomb core composites on most other performance figures.

[JumpCrisscross]

> These can be steel, titanium, thick plastic, etc

Modern materials! I didn’t realise stiletto heels are post-WWII tech.

Apparently it was steel heels (Français) or steel arches (Ferragamo) that enabled the shoe. I wonder if there was more overlap with aircraft or ammunition manufacturing…

Now that I think about it, a nitinol arch compositing would afford lightweight yet flexible support and grounding authority, particularly if you could composite towards a stiffer alloy at the stick end.