My flatmate Priya checked me against the kitchen doorframe last December where we’ve peggoted pencilled height marks since we moved in, and my line was an entire inch higher than it had been for my birthday in March. Nine months, one inch and, tellingly, the only thing that had changed about my body in that time was three portions of banana bread a week and a new pair of Chelsea boots that I’d started wearing almost daily.
I checked myself over in my socks afterwards for the “proper” measurement, and of course hadn’t grown at all. But for about four seconds I genuinely felt like taller legs, when I was stood wearing them. Like the boots had done something not just to how my legs looked but how they felt, which should tell you everything about how effective this illusion is, when it’s working on you.
But that’s not the bit nobody tells you. Nobody talks about how Chelsea boots make you taller. It’s not that they do it in some fraudulent, arguable way, like a trainer with a secret wedge you can pretend doesn’t exist if someone questions it.
It’s that they do it in a way so blindingly obvious that you realise it instantly once you think about it for half a second, but also every single time you catch your reflection in a storefront. I’ve had four pairs now, through every stage of scuffed and they’ll still catch me out occasionally, making me forget that it’s the boots and not, idk, improved posture or late growth spurts causing me to look longer in the leg on camera.
So. The science.
Because someone had to put it out there bluntly.
OK. The bit no one wants first, but that needs saying before we get too attached or deflated. Chelsea boots have heels. Not pencil skinny ones, not heels you’d notice across the room, but an actual solid stacked heel, someplace between two and four centimetres depending on brand and the construction it’s built with. Add that to the thickness of the sole and you’re getting anywhere from 2-5 centimetres of solid height increase from the bottom of your foot to where your foot actually rests. That is not an opinion. That is a Tape Measure question, and yes, before someone important spent their morning I measured my own boots. My Grenson pair added closer to 3cms. My Aldo-esque boots from the high street I bought in a panic before a wedding when my orders hadn’t arrived added closer to 4, because they used a thicker sole to make up for working with less premium leather. Neither are nothing. An inch and half, give or take, is far enough to be noticeable. Enough to be the difference between a jacket hanging on your wrist or just slightly short.
Hell yeah. Yes, Chelsea boots give you height. Plain, plainly yes, by virtue of having a heel and a sole they give you height. Same as any boot with a heel and a sole give you height. Same as standing on a literal phone book. We didn’t need documentaries for that bit. That’s literally all you came here for, wasn’t it? There’s your answer buddy. Go home and see how tall your boots make you on your kitchen floor.
But that isn’t the question, really. Not what people are curious about. I think what people want to know when they google “do Chelsea boots make you taller?” at 11PM on a Friday is something more along the lines of: will they make me look taller in a way that matters? Other people will notice? Am I going to walk taller down the street just because I wore them?
And that, my friends, is a very different question. A much cooler question. And one that took me my own weekend tromping up and down my hallway in front of a mirror to properly figure out.
The magic bit
My Turkmen friend Daniyar who has, since we met eight years ago, never once mentioned an opinion on footwear picked up on my ankle boots making my legs look “like they went somewhere,” which was honestly both the most helpful sentence anyone has ever said to me about my clothes and the strangest. Implicit in that compliment, though he’d never have phrased it that way if we were actually talking about it rather than him just tossing the words out while we waited for lunch to arrive, was that Chelsea boots do more than just offer you height on paper.
They disguise the ankle. There’s no strap, no tie, no visible separation between boot and trouser hem the way you often get with lace ups and even trainers. The line of your leg is one continuous fall from hip to floor, and when a trouser boot sits at the skinniest skim-over the top of the boot rather than pooling over it, that uninterrupted line does more for your perceived height than actual inches ever will.
I first really clocked this sat in a changing room trying on trousers with my sister Fenella, who is inches shorter than me and has, as a result of a lifetime of having to fight for trousers that actually fit at the top, become militant about trouser length in a way I’ve only just grown to understand. She had me try the same pair of trousers, exactly the same size, once with my trainers on, and then again with the Chelsea boots I’d worn in to try them on. Same trousers. Same length. Same me. Yet where they puddled just slightly at my ankle and broke the line in the trainers, they sat perfect in the boots, and suddenly the whole outfit looked less like I’d stolen my brothers trousers and more like they were actually fitted for me. Tape measures didn’t move between wearing those two pairs of shoes. My actual leg length didn’t change by more than the variance in heel height. What changed was the line, that clean uninterrupted fall of it, and that’s the part of the magic nobody seems to talk about when asking if boots make you taller. They’re not looking for inches. They’re looking for why some clothes make us feel bigger than we are.
I’ll caveat this by saying, because shit is the real bit, I actually had this all wrong reversed for a long time. I spent about two years purposely buying my Chelsea boots half a size bigger than I should “for comfort,” because why would anyone tell you to wear shoes that fit when in your whole life? And it destroyed, for me personally, the exact effect I’ve just described. If a boot has space at the ankle, it doesn’t hug your leg. It sags. And that sag, however marginally, disrupts your line just as badly as a shoe with an obvious strap would, only you’d less likely be able to pinpoint why it wasn’t sitting right. It took me hearing my office pal Priyanka, one evening in the kitchen, say my boots looked like they “were supposed to slouch” for me to realise my mistake. They weren’t supposed to slouch. I got home and tried on the right size and the difference was the sort of thing that makes you wanna apologize to every outfit you wore over the last two years.
Where it stops
Obviously, because the whole schtick of Chelsea boots is subtle, it being sneaky AF until someone calls you out on it, there is a point where the illusion stops. Somewhere around the 3-5 centimetres you get from a standard, quality Chelsea boot is enough that no one’s going to question your height. Ask for your footprint or deem them slap on hidden platforms. Push that number up though, past what’s technically necessary to make you look taller and into the territory brands start adding height to boots to improve “tall looking” Google searches, and yes, some brands will literally do this. Add enough height to the heel and suddenly you cross that line into boots that look chunky instead of tall.
I did this. Bought a pair in a January sale, price dropped so low I didn’t question why until my boyfriend Osric, watching me walk across the carpark said I looked like I was “wading.” Literally. That was his word choice. Wading.
Not tall. Like my boots were affecting my height by making me move differently. And once he said it, I couldn’t unsee it either, that stupid little lean forward the excess heel height was adding to my step.
That, my friends, is where the answer lies if there is indeed an answer at all, buried under layers of doorframe checking and begging random friends to tell you what they think of how you look. Boots give you height on paper by a small but not insignificant amount, tiltable with a tape measure and fifteen minutes nobody’s gonna believe you spent analysing your shoe collection. They give you height in the eyes by contouring that line from hip to floor better than any trainer or lace up cares to. And they stop being either as soon as you ask too much of the first and the heel becomes too tall and obvious, at which point you’ve traded an illusion of height for an actual, unavoidable platform that everyone notices and you stop looking like you stumbled across the height magic by accident and start Looking Attractive Because You Went OUT AND BOUGHT SOME BOOTS TO LOOK ATTRACTION.
Still wear mine most days. Still gets pointed out by Priya now and again who is forever threatening to measure our doorframe again as some sort of joke. And will forever catch myself out in shop windows thinking, stupidly for half a second, that something’s changed before remembering it’s just my boots doing what they were literally designed to do, quietly, effortlessly until someone tells you they fucking aren’t.
