So, yes. You know how Barbie’s plasticine feet were, until recently, molded to accommodate sky-high footwear? Claire’s feet, House of Cards has suggested, are similar. “Claire only wears stilettos—Manolos and Louboutins, specifically,” Kemal Harris, whom Robin Wright brought on to style Claire for seasons three and four, explained last year. “You will not see her in a wedge or flats. Unless she is running, of course.”

That is, far from being the silly perma-pumps of Jurassic World (and far also from the TV procedurals that make their female detectives run around in heels), intentional on the part of House of Cards’s creators. Claire’s heels—whether round-toed or pointed, whether pump-shaped or ankle-wrapped or t-strapped—have long served as sartorial symbols: The shoes, which at once elevate Claire and constrain her, function as both a defense mechanism and a power play.

In that sense, heels do for Claire what they will for anyone who wears them: They emphasize the thin lines between control and the lack of it. They emphasize aesthetics over practicality. They suggest privilege but also a kind of willful subjugation—an acquiescence to discomfort, to the dangers of walking in heels, to beauty standards that have been largely determined by men. They are shoes fit for a moment in which femininity is both a source of power and a source of its opposite.

So Claire Underwood walks—around the White House, around Washington, around the world—in a very particular way: deliberately, carefully, intentionally. She strides with confidence, but also with caution. Each step, when you are teetering upon the earth perched upon three-inch-high stilts, is precarious. So each step moves Claire forward; each step also threatens danger. She walks the way she does because of who she is, but also because of what she wears.

In that sense, Claire’s shoes bond her with other women—in the show’s universe, and in the broader one—and also, just as readily, separate her from them. Because there Claire is, wearing stilettos while hanging out in her kitchen. When no woman, no woman who has any say in the matter, would ever do that. (Not even a fellow power player: It’s a running gag in House of Cards’s fellow political satire, Veep, that Selina Meyer takes off her heels the moment she’s in private—and then quickly, and extremely grudgingly, puts them on again when someone important approaches.)

But Claire’s new version of the perma-pump—always there, like a patent-leather limb—also marks a change from previous seasons of House of Cards. While Mrs. Underwood’s heels have long served as extensions of her character—and while her show has long emphasized the way shoes make her walk deliberately, and stridently, and slightly menacingly—House of Cards has also, in seasons past, allowed Claire to remove those heels when the occasion warranted. They allowed her, basically, to Selina Meyer herself. Previous episodes of the show depicted a shoe-less Claire so often, in fact, as to lead one redditor (“I have sort of the opposite of a foot fetish so I notice this a lot”) to remark that “the show really likes to add scenes where Claire’s feet are shown, especially after just having taken off her shoes.”