Can I See Your Toes?
Toe-forward footwear, the culture of "foot fetish," and the big toe opportunity
Of course I’ve seen shoes with toes before. The Tabi cowboy boots, ballet flats, and sneakers, the Avavav Finger ankle boots, and all kinds of Balenciaga’s polarizing footwear. With the exception of Tabis which have gone more or less mainstream as fashion transformed from a niche nerdy hobby into a mass cultural phenomenon, most of these shoes tend to exist in the context of viral social media videos and “I Wore These Controversial Shoes in The Wild” magazine pieces. They are fashion collector items, worn by your wildest (and probably richest) friends of friends to get a crazy fit pic off for IG or draw attention at a function rather than an everyday shoe that could be spotted at a coffee shop. Like MSCHF’s viral monstrosities, they can be easily brushed off as a marketing gimmick rather than any sort of sign for what’s to come.
The Vibram FiveFingers are different. Over the past few months, I’ve watched a number of cool fashion girls across New York and Europe pick up a pair and style them as part of a their daily outfits — from my fiend Sasha Zavyalova who’s been rocking them for a while and wrote a whole love letter to barefoot shoes to Liana Satenstein who picked them over the staple mesh flats and Georgia Graham who documented the process of getting her first pair. Even through wearing these shoes in the wild still looks like an experience that their friends are eager to snap for a giggly IG story, I can’t shake off the feeling that they are wearing them more like an edgier Tabi than a statement Frankenstein shoe. Soon enough, I found myself in the Vibram FiveFinger rabbit hole, saving every designer collab and artisanal take on the classics I could find and harvesting a special sort of admiration for its cute toe-forward design.
But even as my initial discomfort grew into genuine fascination and excitement, the thought of getting my own hands and feet on a pair of FiveFingers still made me nervous. There was just something about the pronounced toes that felt deeply unsettling. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one feeling this way:
“In general, people seem to be drawn to them, but often feel confused about why. So a large part of being a FiveFinger wearer is helping onlookers work through their fascination/confusion/repulsion,” Georgia told me. “I wore them out on Friday night and could feel eyes following my feet the whole time. Emboldened by a few drinks, some people couldn’t contain their curiosity, quizzing me about the shoes. I could tell a lot of them didn’t like them (totally fine) and tried to couch it with neutral-sounding questions like, ‘Do your toes feel weird?’ On the other hand, a few people gave me a knowing nod (I call it the ‘fashion nod’).”
At this point, it’s common knowledge that Margiela didn’t invent the Tabis but rather referenced the traditional Japanese split-toe socks which means that in the East, a shoe with a slit toe and a wider sole has been an ordinary sight for a while. In the Western World, people have been so obsessed with differentiating themselves from the barefoot animals and savages, that they confined their feet in narrow shoes with thick soles and heels to blunt their sense of touch, elevate themselves above nature, and emphasize the difference between their feet and hands. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution pretty much divided the human body into two halves - the intelligent upper body that drove progress and created beautiful things with its hands, and the animalistic lower body that needed to blunted and contained. The polite society didn’t want to see you show or use your toes.
The same academic paper that connected the slightly queasy feeling I got looking at toe-forward shoes to Darwin, cites a couple of other reasons why the narrow, thick, and pointy shoe design stuck around for centuries despite chronically hurting our feet. They were a symbol of the higher class who didn’t need to walk or perform physical labor, urbanization that confined working people into toxic concrete jungles built by their hands but meant to be unscattered by their footprints, and simple utility — pointy toes and heels came in handy in horse riding. All of these make perfect sense to me — I, too, am hesitant of exposing my toes in the grimy subway, and when I see a girl in pristine kitten heels in New York, I automatically assume she has the money to Uber around the city.
Obviously, there is a whole other layer of the online “foot fetish” culture that has made people, and specifically women, uncomfortable exposing their feet and turned showing toes into something almost as intimate and risky as wearing a naked dress or a thong peaking out of your jeans. Yet, as Mina Le noted on her IG story a couple months ago, the tides are changing:
“We were so anti-feet as a culture for a good few years (maybe it started out as a joke w/ girls putting emojis on their feet with the caption “no free feet”) and now mesh flats and flip flops are trendy.”
It’s true - in a matter of a year, mesh flats made the jump from Alaïa’s and The Row’s runway to yet another polarizing fashion trend, and Miu Miu sent models down the SS24 runway in barely-there thong sandals with colorful bandages all over their toes. Does this mean that if tomorrow Sandy Liang put some ribbons and bows on a pair of FiveFingers, in a year girls all over TikTok would be happily crowning them the shoe of the summer?
Seeing specialty sports equipment make its way into gorpcore and then luxury fashion isn’t surprising by now. And with Tabis becoming a pretty ubiquitous footwear choice in any fashion-forward city and mesh flats and thong heels and flip-flops dominating this season, there seems to be a need for a new tasteful “in” signal among the nerdy fashion circles that’s edgier than a Tabi but doesn’t turn you into a walking billboard for Balenciaga:
“There was a time when you had to be a little bit saucy to walk about with your big toe separated from all the others, now you just have to be on the right side of Instagram – where alt-girls upload nihilistic memes and blurred close-ups of their dinners," Daniel Rodgers wrote in Vogue wrote last summer. “All this is to say: if people really want to be weird and confronting, then a Vibram FiveFingers might be the last remaining option.”
Not only do you have to have enough confidence and self-irony to rock something like this, you also have to have enough precision and creativity to style them in a way that’s tasteful and not costumey — bad news for those whose real hobby has been consumption rather than fashion all along. The toe shoes are both minimal and complex enough that if tomorrow they became the hot trendy shoe, it should be still be fairly easy to differentiate between those who know what’s up and those who mindlessly bought into another trend by the way they style them. While running the risk of being banished into the fashion purgatory alongside bold Balenciaga sneakers and now stale Sambas, I have a feeling that with the right pace, collab lineup, and marketing budget, these are the kind of shoes that have a rare shot at reaching the Tabi level of staying power.
IN THE MARGINS:
The Busy Corner Reference Bank is updated with a couple of new links I picked up as I dove head first into the FiveFingers rabbit hole:
The evolution graphic 🙂↕️
love this!! especially the evolution picture and the idea that hard-to-walk-in shoes are a status symbol in cities — all so interesting! 🩷