Stacked heels and shoe lifts … as worn by Simon Cowell, Bono and Nicolas Sarkozy. Photograph: Rex Features, Getty, PA

We are not aware that Robert Downey Jr’s film Iron Man 2 is subtitled “the glam rock years”, so we have to assume that the high heels he is wearing on set are to enhance his diminutive stature. Stacked heels and shoe lifts are nothing new in Hollywood – Pasquale di Fabrizio, the self-styled “shoemaker to the stars”, made shoes for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson until he retired from his shop in LA, and revealed that he discreetly added height to many celebrities (he named Michael Douglas and Sylvester Stallone among others).

On the brilliantly odd and self-explanatory website celebheights.com, which has a contributor called Glenn, 5ft 8in, who gets himself photographed with celebrities such as Mel Gibson and Leonardo Di Caprio for comparison, like a human tape measure, the consensus among its fans is that most male celebrities have a little help.

Simon Cowell has been known to wear conspicuously chunky heels, and a picture of wee Bono on the beach, wearing heels that add a couple of inches to his height, says all you need to know about rock star vanity, while Nicolas Sarkozy, whose wife, at 5ft 9in, is four inches taller than him, is famously a fan of a stacked heel.

Tom Cruise also often appears on a level with Katie Holmes, his 2in-taller wife, and is probably the celebrity that drives ordinary men to buy height-enhancing shoes, says Aaron Sarin, the director of Secretshoes.co.uk, which designs and makes shoes with concealed lifts that can add up to three inches. His shoes are popular for weddings, job interviews and dates, he says. “Women are wearing higher and higher heels and men want to be taller than their girlfriends,” he says. “We get a lot of sales guys who want to be seen as bigger in stature.” Sarin started making “elevator” shoes in 2000 and says he is selling more than ever, adding, predictably, “It’s a growth area.”

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