It is 1975, the Watergate scandal is raging, The Who have just released their musical film Tommy, and Elton John and The Sweet are topping the pop charts.
In Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, President of the UAE, visits a Spanish trade exhibition and finds himself face-to-face with the latest cultural trend.
Platform boots enjoyed a few years as must-have fashion accessories in the 1970s, both for men and women, and were popularised by the likes of Bianca Jagger and, indeed, members of The Who. (In full disclosure, the author of this column proudly owned a blue leather pair at the time, although with considerably less altitude than the ones shown here).
Almost nothing in print survives about this event, beyond this photograph taken for Al Ittihad, the Arabic sister paper of The National, so Sheikh Zayed’s opinion on platform shoes for men remains
unrecorded.
Except, of course, the expression on the President’s face, which tells us everything.
* James Langton