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The sheer elegance 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, a stiletto-heeled shoe with an enclosed toe should be as pointed as possible. If such a pointed toe is to be comfortable, it needs to be long, tapering to a point well beyond the end of the wearer's foot.

Some women are initially cautious when they first try the long pointed toe. They shouldn't be. It is far more sensual, dynamic and flattering than a conventional toe, and makes a statement of supremely confident style. Our opinion is that shorter, bulkier toe shapes and chunky heels simply don't have the magic of the long-pointed, stiletto-heeled shoe. It is an icon far beyond the dictates of fashion - a timeless object of desire, which should remain available at all times. This is why RoSa Shoes exists.

RoSa Shoes' main collection is inspired by the original long-point stiletto shoes (affectionately known to some original wearers as "winklepickers") which attained their pinnacle of refinement and universal popularity around 1960-62, and continued to be worn (despite the "swinging sixties" influence of Mary Quant, Andre Courreges et al) by devotees of the stiletto style 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, surviving examples of the vintage pointed-toe stiletto were already being brought out of retirement by 1976, gracing 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 began to wish they had not broken up and disposed of the old equipment they used back in the 1960s, but too late - production methods, especially for heels, had changed and the art of making the perfect long-pointed, stiletto-heeled shoe was lost.

This fastest-ever turn around from "passe mainstream" to "cutting edge retro" caused an unprecedented craze (certainly in the fashionable 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 even in some ways to improve upon - the classic extended-point stiletto styling, using modern developments in Italian 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.