Fashion: A Shoe-In

It is a longtime fashion dictum, verified daily in millions of beauty parlors, that great beauty requires great personal suffering. By that standard, there should be nothing so lovely as a woman's feet. Through the ages, female toes, insteps and heels have been pummeled, prodded and ultimately propelled into shoes that resemble the human foot purely coincidentally and only occasionally. The pointed-toe look, still so popular last year that a Texas doctor made a fortune amputating little toes, gradually gave way to a rounder toe before blunting off altogether into this year's...

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