The high-priced end of Canadian shoe heaven lives on the mezzanine floor of Toronto's Holt Renfrew store on Bloor Street. Which is as good a place as any to illustrate the problems most women will face when shoe-shopping this season. There sit the $795-plus Manolo Blahnik high-heeled sandals heel to toe with the $598 slingback Pradas. Just next to the Marc Jacobs cream patent peep-toes -- $495 and sold out except for one size 81/2 -- is a private label, silver-sequined, peep-toe platform shoe in the style of Dorothy-off-to-see-the Wizard of Oz($189). Only one little problem hovers like a teeny dark cloud in this azure-blue consumer sky: it's called toes.

Babies are born with 10 of them, usually, and they are sweet, wiggly little things, perfectly smooth with pearly nails. That may be the last moment in life for most of us that toes should be deliberately displayed. The human foot was not designed to wear shoes, at least not the structured little numbers that replaced the post-caveman, bark-and-fabric wrappings. By the time a modern woman reaches her thirties and, heaven forbid, forties, her feet have been eased into shoes that do to toes what the rack and iron maiden did to the human form. The result is a stew of corns and calluses, of toenails evermore yellowed by the application of polish, and toes twisted into shapes once only seen on the tortured feet of dancers.

Which makes it all the more peculiar that for the past few seasons, grown-up shoes have been showing more and more toes. A trend moves by stealth until one day it sits there plonked into our lives like rap and sushi. In this trend, shoes lost their toe boxes. Designers started cutting off the ends of everything from oxfords to boots until, by this season, the exception became the closed pump. Like all trends, it didn't stop in the stratosphere of the $600 shoe. The flyer for Town Shoes(price range $90 to $135)shows almost exclusively open-toed shoes, with the exception of running shoes. Trying to find a stylish summer shoe that covers toes and can be worn into the office or parents' night at school is like looking for Bigfoot. Now you see it, now you don't -- they've been snapped up by desperate but normal housewives -- and only the horrid green suede pair is left. A few shoe lines such as Bally and retailers like Sears remain wedded to the closed shoe, but with classic styles that would happily fit into 1950s Pleasantville.

Added to the show-and-toe epidemic is what André Leon Talley, Vogue's editor-at-large, calls "the cult of the ugly shoe," which is, he explains, "clunky shoes." These are the shoes with wood and leather platforms or wedges three, four, five inches high, and deliberately thick dark uppers. These are a sophisticated and high-priced version of the same shoe you first saw(and argued about)on your 15-year-old daughter half a dozen years ago, when even she, agile and youthful, teetered on their implausible heights. Now, explains New York magazine's spring fashion issue, featuring Balenciaga's laminated leather, six-inch gladiator sandal(US$3,835), the "well-heeled" are "aggressively styled and at risk for occasional wipeouts."

To help women navigate this sticky patch, a subculture of feet fixers has matured. Leading the way is foot doctor supremo, surgical podiatrist Dr. Suzanne Levine of the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and her aesthetic practice, Institute Beauté. The new fad for natural-looking toenails, buffed but without nail polish, requires unnatural solutions given that toenails yellow with age as well as from the prolonged use of polish. So her pedicures include laser bleaching for yellowed toenails(US$300). Scarred or deficient toes can be injected with Restylane so that any unsightly indenture is eliminated. Palomar IPL lasers can eliminate hyper-pigmentation in feet. "It kills off the melanin in cells so it whitens the skin," says Levine, who has many Mediterranean clients with uneven skin colouring. In Toronto, the Elizabeth Milan Day Spa at the Fairmont Royal York hotel is considering less radical procedures than laser work, such as whitening nails with a paste after frazzled feet have been soothed with a honey and milk pedicure.

"I don't make fun of my patients," says Dr. Levine, who did draw the line at one who wanted liposuction for her toes. "I was born with foot problems and had to wear orthopaedic shoes most of my childhood and now I'm the only podiatrist who wears heels most of the day." She injects Botox in feet afflicted with hyperhidrosis(a posh name for excessive sweating). The Botox(injected into the foot's sole)not only stops perspiration, says Levine, but makes feet look better since fungal damage and peeling is corrected when the excessive perspiration ends. She charges US$800 to US$1,000, depending on the size of the foot, while Canadian cosmetic dermatologist Dr. Daniel Schachter has patients buy their Botox from a pharmacy for $450 a vial and charges an injection fee of $250 per foot.

Open-toed sandals have been a staple since Roman times and make a lot of sense in hot summers. They make less sense in air conditioned offices and shopping malls and even less in North American winters. "I blame Abercrombie & Fitch for the whole bare-leg, bare-foot thing," says Oriella Stillo, owner of Accessity, Toronto's first stand-alone hosiery shop that opened 26 years ago.

In 1992, Abercrombie & Fitch, the U.S. purveyor of traditional menswear, got a new CEO -- Mike Jeffries, a maverick about whom very little was known. He turned Abercrombie & Fitch into the temple of "cool" with the help of a rebranding campaign that featured the erotic photography of Bruce Weber. The campaign was largely male beefcake, a lot of young muscled boys with rippled torsos wearing Abercrombie & Fitch cut-offs and the odd female thrown in for diversity.

What emerged was an Abercrombie & Fitch cult of a store selling sexy aspirational clothes. Its young salespeople wore a uniform of bare legs and thonged flip-flops all day, every season, spring, summer, autumn -- and winter.(The company also settled a US$40-million discrimination lawsuit with minorities who claimed they weren't hired or were forced to work behind the scenes because they didn't fit the A & F "look.")Just how much effect the Abercrombie look had on fashion is one of those chicken-and-egg stories, but around the same time, fashion's top people like Vogue editor Anna Wintour started turning up everywhere with bare legs all through winter(though definitely not in flip-flops), and the models on the pages of the glossy magazines did the same.

On Anna Wintour and Gisele Bündchen, the bare-legged look was a smash. On normal middle-aged women, it was definitely less than divine. Legs, never mind feet, take on a rather pale and unhappy tone in the winter. Artificial tans and makeup are both messy and expensive. Besides, after a certain age, even opaque makeup can't camouflage the veins and imperfections of a well-worn leg. But the naked look stuck. "After all," says Stillo, "all the celebrity magazines showed pictures of Hollywood stars in bare legs and sandals day and night. But those women are pampered non-stop. Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton exercise and have massages and tanning sessions eight hours a day. It's their business."

Hosiery manufacturers blinked as sales of tights dipped. For the last 10 years, Stillo watched the decline and diversified into sportswear and accessories early on. "I saw it coming but manufacturers got smart," says Stillo. "They created pantyhose with little rubber dots on the soles to wear with mules so they wouldn't slip off feet. And we have pantyhose that leaves all toes bare and anchors with a thong between the first and second toe. When I went to Europe a number of years ago, I couldn't believe how many women wore fishnets -- it's a standard alternative there and it remains my No. 1 seller in the summertime. Still, as soon as the warm weather comes, Canadian women like to take off gloves and pantyhose."

With the new shoe styles comes a new need for foot care. But pedicures alone won't combat the outrages of hammer toes, heel spurs and the scourge of women and the kiss of death to sandal-wearing -- bunions.

Women are more vulnerable to bunions than men because of hormonal patterns and our thinner bones. A bunion is a degenerative change in the bone that pushes the base of the big toe out and sometimes the toe itself angles inward, often on top of the second toe. Bunions are not caused by shoes -- the cause is probably genetic -- but they can be aggravated by them, and they become inflamed with shoes that rub against them, making every step a living hell. "The best thing to do is choose shoes with an instep high enough that the bunion is covered," say podiatrists, but the new styles have toe cleavage and cut-outs that hit right across the bunion line. Though they are usually more pronounced in middle age, you can sometimes see bunions on younger women. Model Naomi Campbell appears to have one, and when asked what feature of herself she least liked, in one of those beautiful-girl-does-self-deprecation interviews, she replied "my feet."

There is a quick fix for bunions: lasering them away, which only requires about 12 days of recuperation, but the only permanent solution is surgery, with screws holding the realigned bone. "I had one patient who had a bunionectomy at the end of August and was in the New York City Marathon at the beginning of November," claims Levine, though most patients need three months before they are back in stilettos.

Deformities aside, the etiquette of the open shoe is unclear. The tenacious shopper might unearth a pair of shoes by Oscar de la Renta, the designer who can make anything appropriate and elegant, and does with his high-heeled, slim platforms. A barely-there peep-toe in which only one toenail can be glimpsed may be effective, as the late Queen Mother, who favoured the look, knew. "One of the most erotic things a woman can do," says Talley, "is wear a hint of toe. That's a solution if you have withered ones."

Still, at the upper end of New York society, the open-toed shoe remains pretty much a taboo -- only a heel can be revealed. "The ladies are still moving around in their classic Manolo Blahnik Carolyne," says Talley, referring to the famous slingback named in honour of social fixture and then-designer Carolyne Roehm. Anna Wintour wears open-toed flat summer sandals but doesn't wear open-toed heels. "Stick with what you know," she says.

In the corporate world, the open toe is equally iffy. Victoria's Secret's dress code is famously alleged to forbid open-toed shoes as well as fishnets in its retail stores. The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Adminstration has demurred so far on the issue and not yet extended its protective footwear requirements to ordinary office wear, though should exposed feet be deemed sexually provocative, there might be some ruling. In all likelihood, any Canadian or American ruling would cover male foot exposure only. As the self-defined most sexually vulnerable group, women can generally push the office dress code further than men.

But some rules are clear: toes should not hang over the edge of a shoe. Polish should not be chipped. Toe hair is out. Toe rings are probably not a plus in most offices. Once, the wearing of hose with open toes was only for vegetarians or people who drove Swedish cars and voted NDP. This issue is now confused by the newly fashionable idea of opaque hose worn with peep-toe shoes. A nude fishnet stocking can be worn with open-toed shoes that have a heel, provided the fishnet is not so large that one toe sticks through the webbing.

The fashion industry, ever a source of amusement, takes the new shoe very seriously and is moving on from the peep-toe. "For a lot of older women, the stiletto has been the governing idea of elegance," explains Vogue's fashion news editor Sally Singer, "but a slightly sturdier shoe would make some of them look hipper. The platform sole means you don't have the vulnerability of being close to the ground and exposed. For this spring, Yves Saint Laurent showed a ruffled blouse and a skirt with a ruffle down the front. If he had shown that outfit with just an open-toed shoe, it would have had absolutely no impact, but he showed it with that iconic platform pump with a high broad heel that comes to a point all down the back looking like an ocean liner, it was so sleek! That shoe transformed what he was doing," she pronounced. "It was absolutely essential to create interesting and urban fashion." It was also a shoe so massive that walking in it appeared to require new muscles and at least a few practice sessions.

Even stiletto-king Manolo Blahnik has thought about platforms, and for the fashion show of Rodarte -- a new designing team from Pasadena, Calif., who are very much the flavour of the day -- he did a shoe with an oval raised cushion placed on the centre of its sole. Because the cushion is only in the centre of the shoe's sole and not the outer edges, it is not visible as a platform. "The shoe just seems to float by," explained Singer admiringly.

There are, of course, always winners and losers in fashion's blips and, while older feet may not love the new shoes, foot fetishists are almost out of control. Their more harmless Internet sites are awash with accounts of "shoeplay," "soft-wiggling," "perfect soles" and "high arches," with videos of bare feet wiggling around in sandals and cut-out shoes.

Back at Holt Renfrew, a sales associate is watching a telling collision over the last pair of Marc Jacobs' peep-toe platforms. A 21-year-old girl looks at them with amazement. "Those are just so off the hook," she said, with the joy of discovery. The woman of a certain age holding one was remembering 1971, when YSL brought out his Carmen Miranda look and she wore his crazy platforms, painted her toes red, and moaned over Carole King's It's Too Late. If her mother had been there, she might have remembered the war years and the cork platform peep-toe shoes worn with seams painted on the back of legs to create the impression of nylons that were in such short supply. All of this going back to the original madness of the chopines, the platform shoes that reached 20 inches in height, worn by courtesans and the fashion-forward set alike in 16th-century Venice.

Which is the magic of fashion. At its best it can be evocative and delightful, and in its endless cycles and repetitions the young rediscover the hip and chic they never knew their parents and grandparents had.

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