My sister Freya said two words at a wedding we attended in October that have stuck with me ever since. I’d stepped into a pair of knee high boots with my midi-skirted outfit in the hotel room before the ceremony, caught my reflection in the mirror and exclaimed to the rest of the hotel that I looked “like a toddler who’s rummaged through her mum’s wardrobe”. Freya is a woman who has never, in our entire relationship, let me wallow in self pity for longer than about two seconds. Glanced over at me from applying her lipstick and deadpanned: “You look like you’ve got no legs, Han. It’s the boots.” Brutal. And actually, as I discovered over the following six months spent hating myself over exactly that question, not remotely true.
Or, sort of true, but not for the reason we both thought at the time.
You see, here’s the thing about knee high boots and height. Everybody thinks they know what works and what doesn’t, they give their opinion usually preceded by zero research or expertise, and about half of those people will be wrong. I know this from spending years having the wrong opinion myself. For a long time I wholeheartedly believed that knee high boots were, categorically, a shortening option. Full stop. That any woman under 5’5” should avoid them like they were animal-print stretch trousers or an unasked for fringe. Years. I actually told this bit of received wisdom to my cousin Deborah, word for word, at a family barbecue in 2021. Present tense, I swear I will never live this down. We were stood chatting, she in a cute pair of brown boots and I convincing myself she looked shorter than she had any right to because of them. I’ve since realised she looked perfectly fine, straight-up approached my height in that outfit. But I was insistent. I owe Deborah so many apologies that I didn’t get round to giving her that day.
Allow me to dispel every wrong thing I told you about knee high boots when it comes to height because the actual reality is stickier (and more helpful) than the easy rhetoric I bought into for so long.
The boot itself isn’t the problem, it’s the gap between boot and hem you need to watch
Bear with me. After I’d bought four separate pairs of knee high boots in roughly eighteen months time (*tilts head at reader, distinctly unscientifically counted them recently*) I finally figured out what was universally chopping my height off. It wasn’t the boots themselves. It was everything happening around the top of the boot.
Imagine the worst case-scenario silhouette. Boot ending about two inches below the knee. Skirt/dress ending about two inches above the knee. In the space between; about three or four inches of bare leg sitting right at the widest, unshapeliest part of most people’s thighs. That right there is the problem with what I thought was my foolproof outfit. That gap both halves your leg line into separate segments, and also pulls focus to absolutely the last place you want it to when you’re trying to look sleek and streamlined. Instead of your leg being one long vertical line it gets read by your friends/family/colleagues/specialist hospital team as leg. Gap. Boot. And your brain subconsciously interprets that as shorter. Stumpier. Chunkier. Even if you can’t actually verbalise why those boots made you feel less tall than you actually are.
Freya was seeing that gap on me at the wedding. Not the boots. The inch and a half of thigh gap directly below my skirt hem and above my boot shaft that I had, glaringly obviously now that I think about it but completely missed in the upstairs hotel bathroom before one of the best days of my life, created by not having my hem hit right at the boot edge. You only really notice things like that when you’re standing next to your younger sister in the flesh who couldn’t give a toss about your feelings on the matter. God bless her.
Go back to that bad silhouette though and fix the gap and something magical happens. Get your hem to where the boot ends falls OR, better yet, extend that line so your skirt or dress goes past the top of the boot entirely and you’ve gone from having three separate sections of leg/boot to one continuous vertical stretch. I pulled out my boot shortcut teehee and wore the same pair of black boots three different ways to prove my point to myself. Above the knee with a huge thigh gap, my friend Priya said I looked shorter as usual. Boot-top hemline and I looked “normal” to her. Past the boot? She replied I looked “actually quite long, weirdly.” Which I am choosing to believe was her way of telling me my legs looked great.
A heel does play a part in all this, just not as much as you’d think. Wear your knee high boots with a flat sole and you are shaving yourself off slightly compared to the exact same boot with even a small block heel or stack. But it isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of fixing your height in boots that I spent years convinced it was. Once I dealt with the hemline, the heel was a nice enough extra.
The “wear heels with them then” advice is only part of the solution
It’s always been “team heel” whenever I’ve scrolled through a well-meaning Instagram comment section trying to solve my own knee boot woes. Pair with a heel and no-one can tell/knee boots aren’t shortening/etc. Which, yes and no. Heels will give you extra height for sure, but that doesn’t change the other factors at play. If your boots still have that huuuge gap at the top no amount of Loubies are going to fix that problem. I learned this lesson via webcam when I broke out a pair of block heels I’d bought mainly for being two inches taller than my flats. Pulled on a mid thigh skirt so obviously that gap was present and my coworker Tomasz, who loved me enough to always tell me when my outfit was working against me instead of with me sighed via Zoom and said: “have you got shorter boots on today? Did you swap at lunch?” Nope. Height INCREASED, still looked “dumpy” was my unfortunate takeaway.
Repeat after me. The proportion that works is having your boot ending, hem ending and heel height all sitting nicely together. Throw any one of those elements out of whack and you’re not gaining any height back, no matter how tall the heel is or how beautifully your boots sit on your ankles. There’s another factor at play here too that I left out until now because it’s not polite to talk about but will make or break whether those boots make your legs look shorter. FIT. If your boots are super wide and your calves are not then you’re gonna have issues, boo. Wide legged boots = slouchier silhouette = more fabric pooling and folding all over your ankles which = more bulk = shorter looking legs. Period. Bought a pair from one brand that seemed to do one calf size only (read: large enough for about 0.5% of the population) and they might as well have been wellingtons for how they hugged my lower legs. Said so to my mum who was visiting that weekend. She looked at them and replied: “those are wellies that thought it was still raining.” Literal truth. Still wore them twice because I hate waste. Ruined dozens of outfits. Cooled on sending them back.
The tricky rule I learned to stop believing in
Unless you lived under a rock in 2022 (hi guys!) you’ll know I spent that year publicly monologuing about how knees have ZERO place on anyone under 5’4”. Except they kind of do. And let me explain why I wound up doing a full 180 on the issue that made me wanna burn all my boots last December.
Proportion, y’all. Proportion was the missing puzzle piece that I somehow failed to consider for the longest time. Watched a girl I know (Ottilie, she’s 5’1” in slippery socks) turn up to a barbecue wearing knee boots, a longline coat and skinny jeans tucked into them with zero gap at ALL the other week. Boot and trouser seamlessly meeting with her coat riding a good six inches past the top of her boot and… holy shit did she look tall. Like tall enough to where I actually felt short next to her despite me having four whole inches on her, bamboo. It wasn’t her boots, her boots weren’t magic. It was the straight-up lack of anything resembling a disruption between the waist and floor of her outfit.
One long line. Nothing to break up that vertical look.
Same boots, lower top. Boom. Problem solved.
Picked up on it enough that I hunted down Deborah post-barbecue to admit I was wrong. Via text. Still waiting for her to wear those stupid boots again so I can apologise in person.
