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The fashion world’s fetish for feet prevails this season with barely there and toe-accentuating styles strolling off the catwalk and into the streets.
From left to right: Jimmy Choo’s re-release of its 2000s shoe, “The Thong”; The “Jelly Shoe” from Kim Kardashian’s brand Skims; Street style from Paris Fashion Week.Credit: Getty Images
In April, Kim Kardashian’s label Skims released their “Jelly Shoe”, a clear, sock-like creation encasing the foot in nude-tinted plastic with thoughtfully placed “ventilation holes”. The style, which retailed for $116, quickly sold out.
Kardashian’s water shoes were aptly titled, for jelly sandals and slippers have been making a splash in 2025. The retro style, first inducted into the high fashion world by The Row in their spring/summer 2024 runway show, has trickled down to the ranks of Gen Z, who weren’t even born for the jelly shoe’s first go around in the 1980s.
In May, Jimmy Choo announced a re-release of some of its most iconic designs from the 1990s and 2000s, including a skin-baring silver Glomesh stiletto simply called, “The Thong”.
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The British footwear designer’s re-release was well-timed, with toe-splicing thongs migrating from the beach to city streets in recent years.
At the latest menswear shows in Paris, designers like Giorgio Armani, Yohji Yamamoto and Kiko Kostadinov proposed the style as a fashionable option for men, hairy toes and all.
For a more demure take on the trend, peep-toe shoes, offering just a tantalising glimpse of skin, graced the catwalks of brands like Prada, Miu Miu and Khaite earlier this year.
Fashion’s preoccupation with feet isn’t new. Maison Martin Margiela’s “tabis” – a reinterpretation of traditional Japanese work shoes – were first shown in 1988, while designers like Vivienne Westwood have been toying with toes for decades. Daniel Rosebery at French fashion house Schiaparelli has been showing shoes with exaggerated, gilded toes for several seasons now.
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But the prevalence of such shoes, from the fringes of fashion to the mainstream, are perhaps suggestive of the masses’ growing appetite for the icky eroticism of feet (see: singer Lily Allen’s OnlyFans foot account).
As it becomes harder and harder to register shock value in fashion, perhaps more of us are leaning into the wacky and weird to nudge the limits of what’s deemed “appropriate”. “Dupes” (copies) of Margiela’s tabis, for example, can now be purchased for a fraction of the price at fast fashion retailers – a sure sign of a trend’s success.
For urban dwellers, skin-baring shoes bring wearers a few millimetres closer to the grime and garbage that line city footpaths.
Simultaneously, these styles beg of their wearer a certain level of personal grooming. Bunions, corns, unvarnished toenails: it is all on show in transparent shoes. By donning a pair of toe-baring shoes, their wearer signifies to the world a level of commitment to personal care – and the time and deep pockets to do so.
While feet may remain cosily tucked into thick socks and boots for the next few months, the northern hemisphere’s freaky fascination is a sign of the delights (or horrors) to hit Australia’s streets come summer.
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