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Delivery within UK: Shoes £7, Boots £10

Delivery to Europe: Shoes £12.25, Boots £17.50

Delivery outside Europe: Shoes £14, Boots £20

The silhouette of the shoe which became known around 1960 as the "Stiletto" (a shoe with a sharp, extended pointed toe and high, slender, steel-stemmed stiletto heel) is legendary. In our opinion, the toe of a stiletto-heeled shoe should be as pointed as possible. If a really sharply pointed toe is to be comfortable (which it can and should be, despite the ill-founded opinions of those who have not tried the real thing) it must be long enough, not tapering to its point until several centimetres beyond the wearer's foot. Yet, far from making the foot look large, the extra length of the sharp pointed toe reduces it to an almost supernaturally dainty proportion.

Some women initially feel cautious when they look down at their first really long pointed-toe shoe. This soon passes (to be replaced, in our experience, by a craving for more and more pointed shoes!) A really pointed toe is far more sensual, dynamic and flattering than a conventional toe, and makes a bold statement of confidence which sets the wearer apart.

The Ultra-Pointed Stiletto is an icon far beyond the dictates of fashion - a timeless object of desire, which should remain available at all times to those who love the style. This is why RoSa Shoes exists.

RoSa Shoes' main collection is inspired by the original Italian-style pointed stiletto shoes (affectionately known to some original wearers as "winklepickers") which attained their pinnacle of refinement and popularity around 1960-61, and continued to be worn by devotees of the pointed stiletto style (despite the "swinging sixties" influence of Mary Quant, Andre Courreges et al)  right through to the end of that decade.

Despite the subsequent trend for excessively chunky shoes, culminating in the platforms and stacked heels of the early 1970s, the sharp-pointed-toe stiletto shoe never entirely disappeared from the streets. Indeed, surviving examples of the vintage pointed-toe stiletto were already being brought out of retirement by 1976 to grace the feet of creatively dressed young women (often students of fashion or design, or women with careers in the media or the visual arts) and spearheading the concept of "alternative" fashion. Shoe factories and shoe component suppliers soon regretted that they had broken up and disposed of the equipment they stopped using in the 1960s, but too late - production methods, especially for heels, had changed and the art of making the long-pointed, stiletto-heeled shoe was temporarily lost.

This fastest-ever turn around from "passe mainstream" to "cutting edge retro" caused an unprecedented craze (certainly in the fashionable indoor markets of major cities such as London) for old stock, or even pre-worn, original pointy stilettos. Their popularity persisted until the mid 1980s, by which time the supply of early 1960s "originals" was exhausted, and inferior contemporary attempts to copy the original styling by a few small back-street factories in London's East End were the only option available. Nowadays, even museums of costume and theatrical wardrobe departments don't seem to have any really good examples (female characters invariably wear the wrong shoes in recent movies or television drama set in 1960.) Shops concentrating on vintage fashion long ago had to move on to other eras, e.g. the postwar 1940s and 1950s, because there are, quite simply, no more good, original pointed-toe stilettos from 1960 to be found.

We decided that the main purpose of RoSa Shoes should be to recapture -perhaps to improve upon - the classic extended-point stiletto styling, using modern developments in component design and shoe manufacture which make possible an extreme-looking, yet more comfortable, shoe. We have, as you will have seen elsewhere on our website, used a higher variation of our steel stiletto heel for the open-toe, platform-sole styles recently added to our range, but the perpetuation and perfection of the timeless stiletto-heeled shoe, complete with long pointed toe, remains our main direction.