Platform Shoes

Platforms get filed under pure disco excess so often that the practical half of their story tends to get dropped, and I think that's a mistake - the exaggerated sole genuinely solved a problem the decade's own silhouettes created. Once bell-bottoms and maxi hems were dragging around ankles by design, a couple of extra inches of platform kept fabric off the pavement in a way flat shoes simply couldn't, which is a real functional reason the trend had staying power beyond pure spectacle.

That said, spectacle is most of why anyone remembers them, and glam rock deserves real credit for pushing platform height into genuinely architectural territory well before disco picked the shoe up - performers built stage presence quite literally out of sole height, and mainstream footwear followed that lead outward from the stage rather than the other way around. By the time platforms hit their disco-era peak, they'd shown up in nearly every material the decade cared about: cork and wood soles for daywear, glitter and metallic finishes built for the disco silhouette specifically, worn under everything from bell-bottoms to the brief hot-pants-driven micro silhouette of 1970-71, where the extra height did real work balancing a hemline that had gone drastically short instead of drastically long.

The unisex adoption is worth calling out on its own, because it wasn't subtle - men's platform boots were a real, visible part of glam rock and disco style both, not a novelty crossover, which puts platforms alongside bell-bottoms as one of the decade's clearer examples of a genuinely shared silhouette rather than a womenswear trend men occasionally borrowed. I think that's the real throughline for the shoe: equal parts practical hemline solution and pure stage-built spectacle, worn by pretty much anyone dressing for a dance floor by the back half of the decade.