Parents Up In Arms With Company Selling High Heels for Moms and Tots

Has fashion gone too far? Or are parents being oversensitive?
U.S Company Pee Wee Pumps has been selling stilettos in baby sizes to use as a prop at photoshoots since 2014, however after the company’s promo shots were shared on the UK-based Facebook group, Let Clothes Be Clothes, which aims to end gender stereotyping in the design and marketing of children’s clothing – it has received some backlash!

A disgruntled Facebook user said “Apart from the tremendously worrying sexualisation of children such products contribute to, I don’t even want to know the effects these shoes would have on small, developing feet,”

“Do they realize that the reason heeled shoes are perceived as sexy is because the heel forces the wearer to walk with their chest/buttocks out for balance?” added another.

Company owner Michele Holbrook said the UK parents have taken her business idea completely out of context. The shoes are made from soft cotton with a bendable heel and fixed to the foot by a Velcro strap and they are not intended or designed for walking.

“This isn’t the first time that the UK has had a problem — they turn it into something it’s not; it’s a photo prop,” she told Footwear News.

The Company owner added that the shoes only range in sizes up to six months “when babies start to crawl” so they are not even made for a foot that will be pounding the pavement.

“They look at it like you’re sexualising babies,” she told the publication. “That’s their opinion if they want to take it, but they are intended as a photo prop.”

Last May her website traffic also spiked when pictures of infants wearing her product were circulated online and once again criticized for sexualising children. Holbrook is however not concerned as “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” and it just opens her up to bigger clients, such as Coco, Ice T’s wife who used her heels in a photo shoot a few months after her daughter Chanel was born.