When heels get this high, I agree, they are significantly restrictive to movement. Like corsets, skirts which are tight at the knee, long drapey sleeves which drag through soup, elaborate nails which prevent typing, headfuls of rollers which interfere with sleep...in each of these cases movement is significantly circumscribed.
Having watched many people in elaborate ensembles (myself included), I now think that perhaps these are a way of reacting against wildness -- drawing tenuous fences which separate people from animals and fetishing these fences as a way of defining the human, making them as exotic and complicated and restrictive as possible. Some things in culture are deeply beautiful and contribute to one's self-creation and self-understanding by encouraging movement, reaching, exploration, understanding, rhythm; and some things are strangely hostile to life, taking pleasure in the construction of walls, in holding back and restraining.
This kind of behavior shows up in many places. People who feel the need to enforce some kind of separation (between sexes, races, classes, cultures, sides of the railway tracks...) often develop elaborate rituals to distinguish themselves and afterwards hold onto these rituals for dear life as a kind of self-definition -- the rituals become set in stone, or to use another word, fundamentally restrictive.
I'm not an anarchist at all, I should say: there's nothing inherent in systems, in organization and culture, that can't be both productive and aesthetically pleasing. But sometimes, as when looking at the photos you quote, Anita, there's an aftertaste of an entirely different kind: not the productive energy of creativity and culture, but the prohibitive, exclusive feeling of restriction and, I would also add, fear.
