History

Vegas Stiletto Fitness History

Vegas Stiletto Fitness was founded in Las Vegas in January 2009 at SMASH Dance Studio where owner Lisa Valdes and her child hood friend, Shannon Nounna, worked together on a “Ladies Night Out” with “Stiletto Fitness” Lisa created all the choreographies and later moved to San Antonio and added “Vegas” to the Stiletto Fitness because she is a Vegas native. Vegas Stiletto Fitness was born in April 2009 and is growing rapidly. We are currently accepting VSF certifications and investors/partners for further expansion. Please email us for more info at vegasstilettos@gmail.com

A stiletto heel is a long, thin heel found in boots and shoes/heels. It is named after the stiletto dagger, the phrase being first recorded in 1932. Stiletto heels vary in length from 1 inch to 8 inches or more if a platform sole is used, and are sometimes defined as having a diameter at the ground of less than 1/4 inch. Not all high slim heels merit the description stiletto. The extremely slender original Italian-style stiletto heels of the early 1960s were no more than 1/2 inch diameter for much of their length, all though the heel sometimes flared out a little at the tip.

Photographic evidence exsist of Parisian singer Mistinguett from the 1940’s. These shoes were designed by Andre Perugia, who began designing shoes in 1906. The word stiletto is derived from stylus, meaning a pin or stalk. It’s usage in footwear first appeared a fashion magazine in 1959.

High heel shoes were worn by men and women . The design of the stiletto heel would not become popular until the late 1950’s. The stiletto heel came with the advent of technology using a supporting metal shaft within the heel, instead of wood, weaker materials that required a wide heel.

As time went on, stiletto heels became known more for their erotic nature than for their ability to make height. As a fashion item, their popularity was changing over time. After an initial wave of popularity in the 1950s, they reached their most refined shape in the early 1960s, when the toes became as slender and elongated as the stiletto heels themselves. As a result of the overall sharpness of outline, it was customary for women to refer to the whole shoe as a "stiletto", not just the heel. Although they officially faded from the scene after the 1970s, their popularity continued at street level, and women stubbornly refused to give them up even after they could no longer readily find them in the mainstream shops. A version of the stiletto heel was reintroduced in 1974 by Manilo Blahnik who named his "new" heel the “Needle”. Similar heels were stocked by smaller boutiques in Europe. Old stocks of unworn pointed-toe stilettos, and contemporary efforts to replicate them (ironically, lacking anything like the true stiletto heel because of changes in the way heels were by then being mass-produced) were sold in street fashion markets and became popular, and with other fashion styles of the late 1970s until supplies dwindled in the early 1980’s. Subsequently, round-toe shoes with slightly thicker semi-stiletto heels, often very high in an attempt to appear more slender were frequently worn at the office with wide-shouldered power suites. The style survived through much of the 1980s but almost completely disappeared during the 1990s, when professional and college-age women took to wearing shoes with thick, block heels. However, the slender stiletto heel staged a major comeback after 2000, when young women adopted the style for dressing up office wear or adding a feminine touch to casual wear, like jeans.