a new altitude; Towering platforms have been replaced by faceted heels, sporty sneakers, and ironic pointy-toed flats.

Byline: Sarah Mower

There's a problem. The paramedics are here." I think this was the moment-a desperate, overheard whisper from a designer to his assistant backstage in Milan-when I realized, with a little reluctant droop of the neck, that platforms are finally running out of time. Yet another footwear victim (one of several throughout New York, London, and Milan) had wobbled off her shoes and lay being tended among the racks. It had become a phenomenon of the season: At the start of every show, you'd clock the feet first, then the degree of terror in the girls' eyes. Was this a safe-sole collection? Or would all those sixteen-year-old Eastern European Bambi-legs get to the end of the runway and crash down like so much timber? For 20 minutes, every woman in the place would be holding her breath. Things were getting silly out there.

Platforms and wedges are on the way out, then. When a fashion starts to seem silly, we just can't do it anymore, can we? It's not that there'll be a massive step down overnight-believe me, the most gigantic shoes are available everywhere this spring-but personally, I'm opting not to buy any more. Oh, it's a pity, I admit, because we've absolutely, madly loved the past year. So crazed have we been by feeling amazingly long, tall, and gangly that soles have shot up to heights unprecedented in the history of fashion, except, I swear, in sixteenth-century Venice. Did we care that the things we put on our feet were so stupendously heavy and ugly that lovers, mothers, husbands, and children would look at us aghast? We did not. Did we mind walking on foot-plinths so extreme that they made the Carmen Miranda forties and the Ziggy Stardust seventies look wimpy? We positively relished it. Years hence, people will visit museums, look at the shoes of 2006-2007, and barely believe they were possible.

But what to do now? It's tricky because what we're contending with is not just the simple subtraction of a lumpen sole but the rebalancing of a whole equation. In its early days, proportion shift always takes a bit of courage, and especially so in this case, since last year's poufs and bubbles, leggings and tunics were entirely predicated on ending in an extreme foot. (And the alternative ballet flats seem a bit of a cliche now, too.) We're going to have to rework things, and they're not quite clear yet. One thing's for sure, however: Merely stepping back into pre-platform shoes (round toes; strappy stilettos) is categorically not going to do the trick.

Check the collections thoroughly, though, and there are answers. One of them, surprisingly, was on the feet of Miuccia Prada (she who, along with Stefano Pilati at YSL and Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga, made platforms happen in the first place) on the day of her show in Milan. There they were: sleek, pointy satin pumps. Classic, really, yet at the same time a radical statement of abstention from the humongous sole. Close up, though, ...