Fashion
Shoots, Millennials’ Most Maligned Shoes, Are Back In Fashion – And Back On London’s Streets
Every week for about three months in 2005, I would religiously traipse to the shoe hall of Birmingham’s Selfridges and ogle covetously at a pair of Nine West shoe boots. Black suede, with patent brogue details and a sizeable thick heel, these were the “shoots” that I imagined would perfectly nestle inside a wardrobe Venn diagram of organ-squeezing skinny jeans and wispy scarves, that would catapult my secondary school style of shrunken H&M kidswear and TK Maxx Clearance finds into that of Kate Moss. When, one evening after school, I eventually came to try on said shoots with my black school skirt, I wondered aloud why the shoes in question didn’t look quite how I’d imagined. “It’s because you’ve got short legs,” a blunt 14-year-old friend (teenage frenemy?) replied as I stood on my tippy toes in the mirror.
Diminutive legs aside, I didn’t let my stature stop me. Despite the fact that shoes defined as half shoes, half boots, which cut decisively across the ankle, don’t exactly lengthen your legs, shoots were a mainstay of my mid-Noughties wardrobe. I remember wearing a burgundy suede Carvela style with two (!) layered American Apparel circle skirts when traipsing from my university halls in Camden to Amy Winehouse favourite The Hawley Arms, or a tan Urban Outfitters pair with tasselled laces with a shiny snakeskin slip from Zara with intentionally laddered tights and I think a (shudder) beret. I didn’t have a Tumblr, but if I had, it would have been littered with images of Alexa Chung in her array of shoots – worn with pink ruffled Luella Bartley confections and skintight leather leggings. Or Kate Moss, who was rarely seen between 2014 and 2018 without her pair of vertiginous Alaïa lace-up brogues, which Vogue editors have previously referred to as “ringmaster heels” or Mossy’s “most controversial shoes”. In 2022, when fashion editors were flocking to current creative director Pieter Mulier’s crystal-swathed ballet flats, Kate had her feet firmly planted back in her favourite brogue-bootie hybrid.
Shoots may be one of several hideous fashion portmanteaus (see also “jorts” and “jeggings”), but the word does bring a certain amount of indie sleaze-induced joy when shouted with enthusiasm across the room of a fashion party. “Shoots are back!” screamed two former Vogue editors a couple of weeks ago, clutching their iPhones with Vestiaire Collective wishlists of pictorial evidence. Considering skinny jeans have squeezed back into our lives, Sienna Miller has launched a second successful boho collection with M&S, The Strokes’s Julian Casablancas is a collaborator of choice for Charli xcx and Simian Mobile Disco just DJd at London’s megaclub Drumsheds, it’s not exactly a surprise.
“I grew up in the midst of indie sleaze which appears to have been the heyday of the shoot: that sort of dodgy Victoriana-meets-Jeffrey-Campbell aesthetic was clearly very appealing to me,” concurs British Vogue’s former executive fashion news director Olivia Singer. “It was a period of quite bad taste, I had a wardrobe of battered platform half-booties that have thankfully gone mostly undocumented and I feel like their revival has really glossed over how naff we all actually looked. Me and my best friend had matching pairs from Topshop (the high street was really in its element then): witchy and gross and entirely indispensable to the staggering-out-of-White-Heat-after-listening-to-the-Horrors lifestyle that defined my teenage years. I wore a veil and a corset a lot in those days, and there’s something about a shoot which I clearly felt spoke to that spirit.”
We can largely thank Chanel for the catwalk return of the shoot (remember in 2013, when Karl Lagerfeld bought a high fashion spin to the subversive brothel creeper?), which for spring/summer 2025 proposed a chunky-soled lace-up heel in a tactile two-tone weave. Likewise, Paco Rabanne offered a futuristic update to the mid-Noughties staple, with a candy-hued heel wrapped like confectionary in a sheer plastic bootie. Ditto Manolo Blahnik, who has introduced a smart shoot style with geometric cut-outs. And not forgetting progenitor of taste Phoebe Philo, whose tenure at Céline was bookended by shoots (see pre-fall 2017’s pointed white iterations, complete with sleek zips, plus a plethora of either chunky-heeled lace-up styles). British Vogue’s fashion features director Julia Hobbs has already made Philo’s current season duck-foot booties a winter office staple.
For Singer, the key to styling shoots now is to seek out vintage styles. “When I got a bit of money, I bought an amazing second-hand Prada pair: sort of like Westwood Ghillie platforms, but with an Edwardian energy. I have no idea what happened to them, but I am constantly looking for them on The RealReal. Alaïa and Manolo, too, are in my saved searches: their lace-up platforms from that same era. I guess the shoot resurgence aligns with the boho revival: it all speaks to that same timeframe that is just distant enough for us to feel nostalgic for it, but far enough away that we see it through rose-tinted glasses.”
While I’m resigning wearing two American Apparel circle skirts to the past, and attempting to erase any memories of beret-buying from my mind, I’ll too be dipping my toe back into the indie sleaze-conjuring shoe boot hybrid. Next time sometimes screams “Shoots are back!” across a fashion party, I’m planning for them to be pointing at my feet.
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