Strange Arches: Uncovering the Murky Origins of the High-Heel Chair

In Brentwood, Los Angeles, a family home enshrouds a storied time capsule. Like other famed archeological sites—the 5th dynasty tomb of Egyptian nobleman Khewj, or the bedizened insides of a ceremonial chariot recently unearthed outside Pompeii—the teenage bedroom of former MTV reality star Whitney Port (The Hills, The City, The Hills: New Beginnings) has been near-hermetically sealed since she vacated it, carefully preserved down to the leopard print molding, hand-painted by her mother. The room is a leopard-and-fuschia paean to a certain slice of early 2000s LA girlhood. Its construction was a labor of love, paid for in part by Port’s parents and subsidized by paychecks from her first job (gift-wrapping at the local mall). There’s a canopy bed bordered by hot pink curtains; a bubblegum-hued feather boa twisted around a lamp stand; glossy black drawers lined with leopard print; flooring that mimics wood chips. 

“You know when you go to a saloon-themed restaurant and there’s sawdust all over the floor?” Whitney asks over the phone. “Well, we used to go to this BBQ spot in the Valley, and I loved how it looked, so I searched for a sawdust-style floor with my mom.”

The den is immortalized in a YouTube video uploaded by Whitney in December 2020, where she and her husband react to a Cribs-style tour that a much younger, shyer Whitney exclusively gave to MTV. Though I’m admittedly intrigued by her expansive glass shoe collection, another piece of faux footwear bewitched me. Sitting before the dresser vanity was a cyclopean high heel, recast as a chair, its riotous upholstery (patent pink insole, a wild cat’s rosettes) vibrating in the fuzzy glow of an old VHS. “I must have seen it on TV, or had some pop-culture reference,” she tells me. “I remember trying to find a shoe-chair that fit my palette for a while. None of my friends had one. My mom and I used to go antiquing a lot, and we bought it at a random furniture store on Robertson [Boulevard]. I thought it was very sophisticated and glamorous.”

Scour the margins of Y2K-revival TikTok for long enough and you’ll likely spy heel-shaped chairs—like Whitney’s—exalted as historic effigies of ugly-beauty. (Whitney believes her mom “would never get rid of the shoe chair, but if she did, I’d put it in storage and save it.”) The user @bimbocouturee spotlights them in a slideshow titled “my fav trashy things of the 2000s xx,” appropriately soundtracked with the Pussycat Dolls’ 2008 bop “When I Grow Up.” In other clips the chair is a bedroom centerpiece, a campy object to straddle before the ring light’s unholy glare. This new generation of owners might be stooping their pieces, or combing Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for secondhand fare, but there’s also an explosion of the product at mass retailers: Amazon, Wayfair, Sears, and Alibaba currently stock near-identical silhouettes. At Walmart right now, you can buy a generic-brand faux-leather stiletto chair, studded with crystals like a Von Dutch Chesterfield, or a so-called Patriotic version in red, white, and blue. On the janky website FunkySofa.com, customers can even customize upholstery: plush and crushed velvets in a variety of shades, faux leathers, and a range of animal prints under the collection “LA Zoo.”

This June, the New York–based creative studio Pink Essay uploaded a carousel of plush stiletto chairs to Instagram, sheathed in lime green and muted silver and purple leopard print. When asked why they’ve been top of mind lately, founder David Eardley confirmed that the appeal is partly nostalgic; they function as a sign, an associative portal. One glimpse and he’s catapulted inside the television sets of his childhood: the motley, caricatural rooms of Blues Clues; the hard-candy palette of ’90s Nickelodeon. Though he’s unsure where the shoe-seat originated, Eardley finds its brashness refreshing, a rebuttal to the prosaic West Elm–ification of interiors: “In a world of sleek, purposefully unobtrusive furniture—the Togo, the Kagan sofa—the in-your-face rebelliousness of the high-heel chair demands joy, irreverence, and individuality.”