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Find a piece · Platform heel sandal

The platform is a comfort device pretending to be a fashion one.

By FashionMix Editorial ·

Height and pitch are two different things, and almost everyone shops for the first while suffering from the second. Pitch is the drop from your heel to the ball of your foot, and it's what decides whether an evening ends with you barefoot holding your shoes. A four-inch heel with a one-inch platform under the toe has the pitch of a three-inch heel. You stand four inches taller and your foot thinks you're wearing something far more reasonable.

That's the whole argument for a platform, and it's a good one. What ruins it is a platform that's all in the wrong place. The lift has to sit under the ball of the foot and stop, following the line of the sole rather than sitting on top of it as a slab. Get that wrong and you've added weight and a trip hazard without buying back any of the angle.

Then there's the strap question, which nobody discusses and everybody feels by ten o'clock. A single strap across the widest part of the foot holds nothing; your foot slides forward and your toes do the work all night. What you want is something crossing the instep, high enough to catch the arch. Stuart Weitzman built a whole business on fit rather than novelty, and this is the part of the shoe where that shows up.

The piece

Stuart Weitzman Stuart Weitzman Women's Reade Platform Sandals — platform heel sandal
Platform heel sandal

Stuart Weitzman — Stuart Weitzman Women's Reade Platform Sandals

$575at Bloomingdale's

Find it for less

Schutz Schutz Women's Keefa High-Heel Platform Sandals — platform heel sandal

Schutz — Schutz Women's Keefa High-Heel Platform Sandals

$178— Schutz is Brazilian, and Brazil has been quietly making most of the world's good heeled sandals for decades, so this is a cheaper shoe rather than a lesser-made one. Same platform logic, same high-heel silhouette, under a third of the price. The gap shows up over years instead of hours: the leather is thinner, so it moulds to your foot faster and then keeps going, and a resole is not really on the table. For a shoe you wear a dozen evenings a year, that is a trade worth taking.

at Bloomingdale's

Where it goes

When the evening involves standing rather than sitting, a heel with a footprint you can actually balance on is the swap that gets made at the door.

For the same height with the weight spread differently, a continuous sole from heel to toe removes the gap the platform leaves under your arch.

And the strap logic above is the same reason the sandals that hold on at the instep outlast the ones that only look good in the box.

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