On a site that occasionally refers to elevators, I have recently been reading the kinda daft stuff from comments about elevators that makes clear the writers have never worn them, and just have a bit of a downer on height addition. In particular recently I have seen the occasional comment about it being “impossible” to wear elevators higher than a couple of inches, and the usual “everyone can tell”. Clearly mixing up lifts with elevators and not understanding the subject at all.
So OK I wrote last time about the general principles of discretion and detection and what you yourself feel about it. Yep, in an ideal world all guys wanna be 15cm/6” taller and for no-one to know! That’s really it – but the task of getting there (or part of the way there) is limited by practicalities.
A few weeks ago I asked ‘how high CAN you go?’ which was a series of suggestions of how high imho you should go dependent on different factors. But this is a different one. It assumes that you go high already and from time to time think “hmmm could I get another inch – or so!” If the options were available that looked cool, how high WOULD you go if you knew that it was no more detectable than wearing boots that are already the higher elevators. Specially if you are already up there with the 4″ or 5″ styles, and it was working for you.
One question I often get (and think about myself quite a bit) is based on wearing elevators with shorts. In fact it seems to me that guys ask slightly different questions but in the end really want to know one thing – ‘bearing in mind they are more exposed, what can I get away with in terms of height addition in my footwear when I want to wear shorts?’ Often guys fear suddenly going from days and nights wearing 3” or 4” elevators and suddenly BANG – down flat in Converse or Vans. “Aaaargh, suddenly I look SHORT”. And they do not want to stop wearing shorts even if it is just occasionally.
Who do you tell you are adding height? The simple answer to that really IS “no-one”. There is the old saying: “If you tell one person, you have told the world” and when it comes to personal things, people love to gossip even more. The problem is that gossip about people’s personal lives and appearance seems irresistible. But of course set against all that is the fact that many people are not good at discretion or polite concealment – there is a general desire to tell people everything about themselves (on social media etc), which is probably every bit as unhealthy as wanting to hide everything. But unless you are that rare kind of guy who is not bothered that people know he adds height (“I bought some lovely 4” elevators, they make me look really tall” – I have never met one of these guys yet, btw), then I have some rules for you as to how to keep it real while making sure that no-one ever knows. So I start from the perspective of probably almost every guy that has added height and/or bought a pair of elevators – I want to make myself seem taller but at the same time not to look like I am trying to. I also frankly pretty much dread anyone actually knowing or even guessing.
One of the practical issues when you wear elevators is that they DO have some impact on the type of pants or jeans you might wear. It is not as great an impact as you might think (unless you are going for 4” or 5” elevators) but there are some general lessons you need to understand, specially if you haven’t really done much height addition before.
If most of us are honest, we would all like to just wake up and be ‘several inches’ taller. You would be amazed at the contacts I have who are already over 6’ and want to be several inches taller. I don’t think for anyone it is a specific figure, and when guys try to put a figure on it, they often end up with a kind of figure they can end up disagreeing with: one friend who is 5’7” will say that he just wants to be “a couple of inches taller”. But if you then say “so you would not like to be 6’ tall in an ideal world?”, he is, like, “well, no, but maybe yes, but how can I anyway?”.
I recently went to a wedding and it got me thinking about the limits on height addition in more formal situations. Really, it’s simply another of those lifestyle limitations I have mentioned before, and if you have to dress very formally a lot then you have to think carefully right from the start about the level of extra height you are going to try to add on a regular basis. However, we probably all have to cope with occasional situations where the limitations mean we can achieve less by way of extra height than we normally do.
Another area for much mythmaking is over the relative attraction or importance of height. A bit like other appearance issues, we are always being fed opposite and confused messages by the media. Read the popular press and you will see: “Hunky 6’4” Mark with his huge pecs and biceps looks great in his board shorts at the glamorous resort in the sun where 43 women have been chasing him for attention day and night” or whatever. A comment you will not read in such a slavish way about someone who is 5’4”, and averagely overweight slapping on the suntan cream at this ‘glamorous resort’, even if 143 women are chasing him night and day. That really is just a fact. It is nothing to get too bothered about either.
One of the reasons I started advising people about adding height was my own experience starting around the year 2000 and the fact that I saw absolutely nothing online by way of advice. 16 years later, there still isn’t much! In common with a lot of areas about personal appearance, there is just a whole lot of rubbish masquerading as fact – fake ‘facts’ with no proof or research. The lack of proper info is a vacuum, which means that all sorts of odd folk pour in their particular bias, frantically typing away like maniacs howling abuse at anyone who does something they just don’t approve of, and making up any old rubbish to suit.
