Photographs by Caitlin Abrams
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She left her podiatric surgery practice to create a unicorn: comfortable, ergonomic high heels that look cool!
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MSPMAG: When Marion Parke thinks about her preppy looks from her high school days back in Oklahoma, “I cringe a little bit,” she says. Her look today is more “surgeon on her day off”—her long blond hair cascades over her nautical-striped sweater, and her flared jeans tastefully obscure a pair of wicked black leather kitten-heeled boots of her own namesake label. But she credits her school days playing field hockey with inspiring her to enter the medical profession: “Whenever somebody got hurt,” she says, “the only people who could come out on the field were the coach and then whichever parent was a doctor or a nurse.” So now, yes, Parke is the founder of the Marion Parke women’s footwear collection, but she’s also still a licensed podiatric (“You can just say foot and ankle,” she says) surgeon.
In fact, at lunch with me at the D’Amico café on the ground floor of International Market Square (she seems genuinely stoked that it’s Taco Tuesday), a couple floors down from her label’s headquarters, she recalls another moment of inspiration: sitting in her first-year biomechanics class at the podiatry college she attended outside of Chicago, learning about different foot types.
“And as I was listening to the description of what happens to people with high arches,” she says, “the anatomy of their feet, the problems that they have, I started realizing, Gosh, all those problems really sound similar to the problems that women have when they’re wearing a high heel.”
Years later, she was living in Minnesota, working part time at a podiatric surgery clinic in Edina, very pregnant with her first child, buying up boxes of heels from DSW and slicing them up to find out how they were put together. She eventually found a shoemaker in Italy who helped her navigate the design and manufacture process, and she brought her first line of Marion Parke shoes to market in 2015. She used to run the label out of a converted closet on the floor above Spoon and Stable in the North Loop. Now, Marion Parke’s headquarters are in International Market Square. She no longer operates on feet; instead, she outfits them with $495 buff suede pumps and $795 black glitter kitten-heel boots. First Lady Jill Biden was photographed wearing Marion Parke heels to the coronation of King Charles.
“People ask, ‘When you stopped seeing patients, was that hard?’” Parke says it was, and she says she still misses surgery. “But I think I can help more women in a year with my shoe company than I could over a lifetime of being a doctor.”
Trifecta
Three things about Marion Parke
- Marco Durantini was the shoemaker who oversaw Marion Parke’s production in Italy until retiring in 2021. “He actually came out of retirement to work with me.”
- Marion Parke is expanding shoe production to Brazil. “Women are saying, ‘If you can make it outside of Italy and make the shoe for less, I’d rather save the money.’”
- “If you’re going to wear high heels, you need to stretch your calf muscles every day,” she says.
What’s the point of a high heel?
I’m certainly no expert, but I think if you go way back, men were wearing them to ride horses.
And then didn’t members of the French aristocracy start wearing them to make themselves look taller?
Oh, for sure. In a fashion sense, yeah—there’s always been a confidence element.
Who was your fashion inspiration growing up? Did your mom wear heels?
Well, it’s funny, because it was actually my grandmother who loved to sew dresses for my sister and I—we’re only a year and a half apart, so we dressed alike a lot. But no, I think my mother would say she wasn’t particularly a fashion maven, but I really did admire the moms who were.
Where did you get your ideas about fashion and beauty?
I would say my mother certainly is an admirer of design. She’s an artist.
What kind of an artist?
She has a fine art degree. This is a cool story: My mom left college when she got married; it was that time in the world in the late ’60s. And repeatedly throughout my entire life, she’d always say, “I wish I never did that.” So, she went back to school at the University of Oklahoma eight years ago and earned her BFA.
So, your parents weren’t like, “Become a doctor or else.”
My dad was an attorney, and my grandfather was an attorney—he became a judge on the Supreme Court of Oklahoma. I would say that my parents were an opposites-attract sort of couple—she was whimsical and creative, and he was very organized and regimented. I think there’s an element of that DNA in my brand, too, this idea of science and biomechanics and anatomy meets creativity and artfulness.
The high heel was never intended to be biomechanically safe, was it?
It’s funny to say it that way because this whole idea of “beauty is pain”—I dislike that so much. It doesn’t have to be that way, really.
Well, wear flats then, right?
I’d say we’ve all worn high heels that have actually been pretty comfortable. You wear them for a long time at an event, at a wedding. And we’ve all been in flats or kitten heels that were excruciating. Footwear is interesting in this way. I learned this when I got started—that a well-fitting shoe comes down to millimeters.
But don’t high heels present an actual medical risk?
I would say high heels put the wearer’s foot into a biomechanical position that’s similar to what people with high arches have. So, when you rise up onto your toes, the anatomy of the gastrocsoleus complex—the complex that includes your calf muscles and your Achilles tendon—tends to supinate. And that’s where we sprain our ankles.
So, you’re more likely to roll your ankle in heels.
Exactly. That’s a common problem that women have when they wear high heels, because you’re overloading the outside of your foot. Part of what the insole that I invented does—it’s twice patented now; it’s really exciting—is it helps discourage that tendency to over-supinate and to be so unstable. The footwear industry—countless brands, small and large—has leaned on the idea that it’s easiest to market cushioning and to make the toe box wider. And that inevitably makes the shoe look heavy—“grandma”—just ugly.
When did you decide that you were going to leave your podiatric surgeon practice to design shoes?
Before we moved here for my husband’s job, I had been treating patients in the Bay Area, and I just was hearing more and more from women, “Gosh, why can’t I wear anything that I want to wear for more than 30 minutes?” And whether it was a female patient, men, women, kids, it seemed my encounters almost always ended with how to shop for shoes based on your foot type: “Here’s what to look for.” And then that sort of evolved into patients saying, “Dr. Parke, you should go on the news and tell people what to do because this is really helpful.” And that evolved into, “You should make shoes.”
Your husband is an ophthalmologist. Wasn’t he initially skeptical of you leaving your medical practice to design shoes?
He was like, “If it was such a great idea, how come someone hasn’t done it yet?” Fair question.
What was your response to that?
I said, “I think that people have tried to do it; I just don’t think they’ve done it on quite this taste level. And I think a lot in the fashion world—in the creative world—it’s about taste.”
What was your design language initially? And what kind of woman were you hoping to dress—cool podiatric surgeons like yourself?
I was frustrated with the way the shoes that I admired fit and felt.
And what shoes did you admire?
At that time, I loved stilettos. I didn’t like prissy, but “ladylike with an edge” is what I like to think that we still design toward. But for me, it was this idea of wanting to communicate what the brand’s point of difference is. My hope was that when women hear our story, they’re going to want to throw all their shoes in their closet away and start over. And for us, it was like, Well, what would they want to start their shoe wardrobe over with? So, we started with the classics: some really great Mary Janes.
How high are the heels on your shoes?
The highest heel that we make is 85 millimeters.
How many inches is that?
3.3. You get the look and feel of a 4-inch, but it’s a lot more comfortable, a lot more wearable. We didn’t do pressure testing; there wasn’t a science-y idea behind that.
Because the scientific consensus is “Don’t wear high heels,” right?
It’s funny, because even the American Podiatric Medical Association says, “Look, we know we’re not going to talk women out of wearing high heels, so let’s educate women on how to wear them in a smart way.”
“My hope was that when women hear our story, they’re going to want to throw all their shoes in their closet away and start over.”
—Marion Parke, Footwear Designer
The first celebrity to publicly wear your shoes was Carrie Brownstein, who sings and plays guitar in the band Sleater-Kinney and who stars in Portlandia.
The coolest cool girl ever.
And she wore your shoes on Colbert, right?
I still get chills thinking about that.
Did you make that happen?
What was cool about that connection was we did our first photo shoot in New York. It was just a stills shoot—we didn’t have models at the time; we just had the shoes. The photographer is in a band with Carrie Brownstein’s stylist. I think we were chatting on the side and he was like, “So, who do you want to get in your shoes?” And I was like, “Carrie Brownstein is the ultimate cool girl, and if this message can resonate with someone like her, you get the seal of approval from someone who’s cool.” Because for a while, the idea of comfortable shoes, that was not cool. So, if you could get the ultimate cool girl to wear them…
You could make comfort cool.
Yes. So, we had sent her some shoes to consider. Carrie was on her book tour at the time. And, yeah, she goes on Colbert. I get a text from her stylist saying, “Just so you know, Carrie wore your shoes for her Colbert interview,” and I was like, “Oh my God.” And I said to my husband, “I can quit now.” And he was like, “All right, slow down.” And what was cool about Carrie, too, when she was on that book tour, I was following her on Instagram, and she was going from city to city, and I was like, “Oh my God, she’s wearing them again.” And that also was validation to me. I was like, “Well, she must like them.”
She was addicted to them.
She must think they’re comfortable, yes. Her stylist said, “I can’t get her to take them off.”
When did you find out that Jill Biden wore your shoes?
The first time that we saw her wearing them, it was this beautiful photo on Instagram, and she’s walking down the hall outside of the Oval Office. This was almost a year after the election, and she’s wearing this long navy coat, and she’s wearing these bright red pumps that we knew she had but didn’t know if she would ever wear them.
Did you get them to the First Lady, or did she buy them?
That’s classified.
Does Jill Biden hurt you with potential Republican shoe buyers?
I keep saying that over and over again: It’s just such an honor, no matter what your politics are, for a First Lady to be wearing your brand, as a start-up business, and she repeatedly goes for them. And I think the reason Dr. Biden chooses to rewear them—I mean, clearly, they work for her, right? They fit well, they feel good, but also, we’re a female-founded brand based here in the U.S. And they’re shoes that last—we don’t make fast fashion. They’re well made, high quality, and you can wear them over and over again, hopefully for many, many years. It’s funny, because I think we still have customers who don’t know all of the brand DNA and the story; they’re just buying them because they like the look.
You don’t really have a designer signature either—like red bottoms or something.
I think the customer who likes my brand likes discretion. The overt branding, that’s not who we are. We are much more of a quiet luxury. The comfort element is also very discreet. And for me, that’s what I wanted. I need a comfortable shoe, but I don’t want it to scream, “I’m wearing a comfortable shoe.”
