 As a curator, as a historian, I love material culture. I love objects that hold the possibility to tell stories. My name is Lisa Small. I'm a curator of exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, and I'm the curator of the exhibition Killer Heels, the Art of the High-Heeled Shoe. I didn't want to present a chronological survey. I wanted to do a thematic sort of look. So I was looking at shoes that really had very striking or innovative designs, different ways that designers have interpreted this form. And I began to see that there were so many visual echoes and relationships between old and new. I talk about things like the platform, which has been around for over 2,000 years, or the shape of the Louis heel, named after King Louis XV of France. I noted the eastern influences, designers looking at the form of the gaita, the wooden sole Japanese shoes, or the Manchu platforms from China, along with heels that really incorporate fetish style, a lot of studs, spikes, things like that. I wanted to explore architecture. Architecture and high heel design have a lot in common when you think about support and structure and height, even. I saw so many heels that were about ideas of metamorphosis. High heels that themselves have sort of hybrid forms and designs that have a really futuristic, space age vibe to them. We also have six commission films that run through the entire exhibition that somehow took the high heel as their conceptual or thematic starting point. There's a real range from the Salvador Ferragamo stiletto that belonged to Marilyn Monroe and the Schiaparelli shoe hat to something that looks like it was grown in a laboratory. I think we're in a moment where people are asking, can they get any higher? Can they get any more extreme? And it's funny because I think that's a question that's been asked actually for hundreds of years.