Christian Louboutin. “Printz,” Spring/Summer 2013. Courtesy of Christian Louboutin. Photograph: Jay Zukerkorn. Displayed as part of the Brooklyn Museum “Killer Heels” exhibit.

Our characters should have an arc, starting in one place and changing as they resolve the conflicts they encounter along the way. One way we can show character change is to show behavioral changes. In the beginning, our hero is immature, at the end he has grown. In the beginning, our heroine was selfish. At the end, she thinks of others. Progress!

Recently I realized that one way I show how characters change is that I change their clothing choices. In one manuscript, my heroine starts out wearing overalls and steel-toed work boots, which, by the end of the book, she’s discarded for palazzo pants and high heels. In my current WIP, my heroine goes from suits and high heels to a poodle skirt and saddle shoes, and then to the skinny jeans and ballet flats that describe her new life.

What’s with the heels? I wondered. Besides that they’re consummate female attire. Except for cowboys.

Cowboys is right. Five hundred years ago, high heels were standard footwear for sixteenth-century Persian horsemen. Then the style moved from Persia to Western Europe, where aristocrats wore high heels to set themselves apart from the hoi polloi. But when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804, he ended this high-heeled, high-powered fashion statement by wearing flats.

This information is included in a new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum called Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe. The exhibit covers 500 years of high-heeled footwear, exploring the history of the shoes themselves, as well as the history of status, fantasy, innovation, beauty, and sex as told through shoes.

Did my heroines think about this when they either put on or kicked off their high-heeled shoes? You can bet your sweet Manolo Blahniks they did.

My heroine who forsook overalls and steel-toed boots for high heels? They were a special pair, bought for her by a problematic male character (okay, my hero) who thought every woman should have at least one thing that was frivolous. She wore them on her way out the door. (But she came back later. Much later)

My other heroine, who gave up heels for flats by way of saddle shoes—she’s a spy. And spies can’t go running after bad guys in heels.

At least somebody’s practical around here.