The Year Everyone Got Their Toes Out

The fashion industry has always had, to some degree, a shoe fetish. From Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2010 armadillo shoes and Hood By Air’s double-faced cowboy boots in 2017 to the forever multiplying ugly hybrid footwear ideas of today — like New Balance and Miu Miu’s new sneaker-clog combination — it seems the freakier the shoe, the more everyone talks about it (and then, potentially, the more it sells). In 2024, however, it hasn’t been elaborate heels or animal-like silhouettes that have captured everyone’s attention. This year will be forever marked by the growing hyperfixation on toes: a time when everyone in fashion let their dogs out.

So far, we’ve seen toes on the runway encased in Sandy Liang’s see-through ballet flats or Collina Strada’s see-through mesh zip-up boots, laid out in Fidan Novruzova’s exposed-toe boots, or indented in the Schiaparelli pumps worn by Kylie Jenner over Paris Fashion Week. Vibram FiveFingers have secured their spot in high fashion circles, with Kiko Kostadinov redesigning the silhouette for summer and influencers like Melissa Bon incorporating them into street style. Coperni took the industry’s favorite humble brag of a shoe, the Margiela Tabi, and added three more toe slits for Spring 2025, and both Khaite’s latest pumps and Tory Burch’s Spring 2025 runway heels have been given an upgrade that makes way for major peep-toe cleavage action.

Coperni
Photo: Justin Shin/WireImage

The increase in toe-related fashion moments has no doubt been ushered in, in part, by our current ’90s thong heels renaissance and the subsequent return of Havaianas. But, according to Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, we’ve not officially moved beyond thongs into new toe-rritory (I’ll stop now). “I haven’t seen anything quite like this before,” Steele says. “We’ve had low cut, toe cleavage, and naked shoes, but this is an interesting phenomenon fetishizing a particular body part, the toes, and it may just be because that’s a novelty at this point.”

Tory Burch
Photo: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Tory Burch

With toes already playing a central role in fetishism, Helen Persson Swain, an independent fashion curator, says toe-focused designs can be considered fashion’s attempt at teasing. If you compare thong heels to a fully naked body, she says that mesh ballet flats become “lacy underwear” for the foot. “They frame the foot sensually while revealing and hiding the toes,” Swain says. According to Liana Satenstein, writer and host of Never Worns, we’re increasingly excited by toes because they’ve become the last frontier of sexualisation in fashion. “We’ve seen everyone’s butt, we’ve seen everyone’s boobs, and we’ve seen every inch of celebrities at this point,” she says. “So I think the toe is leading us to the sexual soul of the person; it’s an erotic zone that we don’t pay enough attention to.” There’s also the fact that the area is extremely nerve-rich, which Steele says might be turning us on. “Interestingly enough, the part that corresponds to the feet in our brains is right next to the part that corresponds to the genitals,” she says. “So there may even be some brain synergy flashing back and forth between the two.”

Aside from sex, Steele says we may be seeing more toe cut-outs purely because of new technology. “You can now play with interesting shapes with 3-D printing far more easily than you could in the past,” she says. “It must be a fun period to be a shoe designer.” This also means that as technology evolves, we can expect more toes. One fashion trend forecaster on TikTok (@fashunadict) even called silver sequined Vibram FiveFingers “the representation of fashion in the next five years,” and perhaps it was due time for toes to take the spotlight. “At different times, different areas of the foot have been deemed alluring and put on display,” says Swain. “Why not toes themselves?”