Fashion Week Designers Want You to Cut the Toes Off Your Socks
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the year of the toe. The last two runway seasons have said as much, but truthfully, we’ve known. The complete and utter mainstreamification of the Margiela Tabis (please don’t take this as bitterness, but you must admit, it’s kind of a shock) and the hard metal toe-shaped shell at the front of Schiaparelli’s boots, heels, and sneakers were certainly an indication. But at this point, against the warnings of posting free foot content, we are just going ahead and showing toe.
Perhaps the most beautiful, possibly alienating example of this was the SRVC. Their fall/winter ready-to-wear show featured socks with heels, but with the socks cut out for the baby toes.
Last season, Coperni’s incredible runway show at Disneyland Paris featured these sporty-looking climber shoes with these animal-like paw toes. Not to be mistaken for shoes with articulated toes. These are not that. They are more like a molded toe.
Schiaparelli’s latest show took a more traditional turn, its goal to be making modernity out of antiquity, but up until this show, Daniel Roseberry has taken great care to make a body of work at Schiaparelli that honors and practically parodies the intricate details of human body features. It’s not just about beauty, but rather about surprise and delight.
I actually think the showing-toe trend is about about surprise and delight. The joke online, which takes after the foot fetish thing, is that you don’t post feet for free, but honestly why not? There’s something kind of funny, charming, and animalistic about the foot fetish, the way there’s something funny, charming, and animalistic about the foot itself. It’s kind of ugly and kind of weird. It’s not quite so sexual a body part the way tits and asses are, but it’s still a disturbing body part nonetheless. And that disturbance is the reason you can’t look away. A move like showing feet, even showing a mold of feet, is meant to disrupt. It wouldn’t work if it was easily digestible.
