Comment: Why should women have to wear heels?

Ines de La Fressange, Isabella Rossellini, and the model Aymeline Valade have opted for flat, Grecian-style sandals for the red carpet this week. Photos / Getty Images

Red-carpet season is upon us, and with it a new raft of draconian dress code edicts.

Convention dictates that celebrities are required to wear form-fitting designer dresses, preferably as an addendum to a lucrative modelling contract and aided by a giant TubeGrip; to sport immaculate manicures (the E! Entertainment network's Mani Cam is policing snaggled cuticles); and to possess hair as luxuriant as Cousin It. But now stylists and their celebrity show ponies must add a new nota bene to the fitness charts and diet diaries: flat shoes are verboten.

The memo came at the starry premiere of Cate Blanchett's new film, Carol, at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, when several women in their 50s were turned away from the red carpet for not wearing high heels. Screen magazine reported that "multiple guests, some older with medical conditions" were denied entry to the premiere for wearing "rhinestone flats". Asif Kapadia, the director of Amy, a documentary about the late singer Amy Winehouse, confirmed on Twitter that his wife had suffered the same fate.

Although the festival declined to comment on the specific incident, a spokesman confirmed that "it is obligatory for all women to wear high heels to red carpet screenings".

@muirkate happened to my wife (eventually let in)

— asifkapadia (@asifkapadia) May 19, 2015

Aside from the delicious irony of such a judgment falling at the screening of a film that depicts lesbian romance and whose stars have openly criticised gender inequality at Cannes this year, more than ever the high-heels mandate serves to show how out of touch - and distinctly tacky - the Croisette has become. For as any regular viewers of E!'s Glam Cam 360 can attest (alas, they do exist), a woman standing ramrod straight in flat shoes is far more graceful than one hobbling around in vertiginous heels.

Furthermore, too high a heel on an average-height woman looks ungainly - there is nothing more supremely chic than looking comfortable in your shoes.

The catwalk, so often as islanded from civilian life as Paris Hilton is from good taste, is in agreement on this one. The message from the spring/summer 2015 collections was loud and clear: flats are back. At Valentino, Balenciaga, Erdem, Dries Van Noten and Stella McCartney, red-carpet-worthy, full-length dresses were all paired with flats. At Burberry, Christopher Bailey styled every look in his show, including delicate tulle and silk dresses, with either trainers or flat sandals. "The ease of the flat shoe was there so that everything felt just that little bit more effortless," Bailey said.

And so to the red-carpet rebels, who refuse to pour their trotters into podiatric cantilevers. Emily Blunt, asked on Tuesday how she felt about people being banned from the red carpet in flats, weighed in with this bombshell: "Everyone should wear flats, to be honest. We should not wear high heels anyway. I prefer wearing Converse."

That Blunt was wearing 4in Jimmy Choos for a Cannes photocall earlier in the week, we shall ignore - Ines de La Fressange, Isabella Rossellini, and the model Aymeline Valade have opted for flat, Grecian-style sandals for the red carpet this week, breaking with Croisettiquette and looking all the happier for it.

A caveat: there was one small pigeon-step towards gender equality when the art dealer Larry Gagosian was also turned away from the Carol premiere on Sunday, for daring to wear plimsolls. Gagosian was saved, however, by his good friend, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who entered negotiations with security, before eventually persuading them to allow Gagosian entry. It's now what you know...