This Boot Is Work.(The Talk of the Town)(Monica boots)

Boots tend not to be twenty-eight inches high. Twenty-eight-inch-high things are more like: your daughter who's nearly two, an M.T.A. subway turnstile, the bathroom sink, or a suitable-for-show female Great Dane. The measurement is also the daunting height of the most common size--38--sold in Christian Louboutin's suede pull-on Monica boot, which has a 120-mm. covered heel, no zipper, and extends past mid-thigh.

In shoe departments across the city, the trying on of this boot (cost: $1,790) has inspired F.A.Q.s ("How do those work?") and varied protocols. There are folders, pushers, rollers, and scrunchers. There are ladies who know that you need to show up at the store wearing something with leg access ("Tights are best--they give you a certain level of slip," one saleswoman said) and ladies who ask to take the boots with them into the boutique rest room, or who are favored enough clients to get a pair sent home with them to squish into in private. If you're wearing pants, forget it. "You want a little bit of scrunching," Shawna Rose, Louboutin's director of communications, advised recently."I would just say, even distribution."

"I'm not going to lie to you," Michael Nitis, the manager of the Louboutin boutique on Horatio Street, said one afternoon. "It's going to take a good five minutes to put them on, and a lot of wiggling around." Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys, observed, "Louboutin girls are very determined. You get the sense if they had an X-Acto knife and some margarine they'd do whatever they could to get that boot on."

Indeed, the Monica comes with some very public fears: of fat, of failure, of flashing. (At the uptown store, sales were slow until Season Dolan, a five-foot-two saleswoman, wore the boots in black on a busy Saturday in fall; they sold out within the week. Citywide, the first full-size run was gone by early November. By February, they were almost entirely gone.) Which is why anyone maneuvering into a pair wants to be on the north-facing side of Christian Louboutin's Madison Avenue store. "There are no mirrors over ...