Look of the week: Saint Laurent’s see-through shoes reveal fashion’s growing foot fetish
Connor Storrie in his nasty little boots at Saint Laurent.
By Rachel Tashjian, CNN
Recently, it seems one thing — or pair of things, with ten digits — has occupied the minds of fashion designers more than anything else: our feet.
This week, at the men’s Summer 2027 Saint Laurent show in Paris, creative director Anthony Vaccarello showed a collection of quiet perversity disrupted by a starling pair of foot-baring shoes. A lovely slate blue suit, with fluid trousers and a boxy, 80s-inspired jacket that would make any Bret Easton Ellis antihero proud, ended with a deviant surprise: a pair of clear vinyl oxfords. The French capital is in the midst of a heat wave — the day of the show was the city’s hottest ever June day, until Wednesday eclipsed it — and the model’s toes steamed inside the oblong footwear. Several more riffs followed, in accordion folder brown and another-day-at-the-office taupe, their corporate colors merging with the tailored looks to conjure a cubicle siren mood. And the notoriously unbreathable material, combined with the stuffy weather, created unsettling clouds of pedal condensation on the shoes’ uppers.
The foot play wasn’t just on the runway. “Heated Rivalry” star Connor Storrie attended the show in a black vinyl trench coat, which he mercifully removed to reveal a tank top and shorts — and a pair of knee-high latex leather boots.
So what’s up with the foot fetish?
The potentially odorous oxfords and bawdy boots come on the heels of another viral foot sensation. Earlier this year, Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy inspired days of debate when his very whimsical, very extravagant resort show, held in Biarritz, featured a number of sandals that laced around the heel and left the toes exposed. Was this luxury trolling, or the expression of a lifestyle so fabulous that an entirely new breed of footwear is required? Probably a bit of both.
Fashion has in fact been focused on feet for some years now. Jonathan Anderson, first at Loewe and now at Dior, has a secret weapon in Nina Christen, whose unusual approach to footwear, at once elegant and perverse, has made pumps made out of bunches of deflated balloons, fake bars of soap as heels, and water lily-shaped sandals into viral sensations. Although The Row has cultivated an aura of quietude, its peculiar shoes, like a simple mesh flat and a jelly shoe, constantly sell out among consumers who wouldn’t otherwise dream of buying the label’s $3,000 trousers or five-figure handcrafted coats. Tory Burch, who has turned her Palm Beach-esque prepster label into the wardrobe for thinky young glamour hounds, seems to have a spunky yet pretty shoe in every collection, with the most recent being a spangly, high-vamp pair pump, fit for a Park Avenue hostess save for a splash of shocking neon orange.
And of course, the history of the unnerving shoe extends way beyond the advent of social media. The Margiela Tabi boot, which adapted a Japanese split-toe style into a paint-encrusted boot, is perhaps contemporary fashion’s first shock trotter.
Practically speaking, shoes are an easier, less expensive and fraught acquisition than clothes (few people are embarrassed by their shoe size). Handbags have begun to lose their luster; fashion and culture journalist Amy Odell reported this month that shoppers even believe the ultra-exclusive Birkin has become too ubiquitous.
The Saint Laurent shoe, though, puts a finer pointer toe on the current movement. For years, designers have used celebrity-jammed front rows to convince the world that runway shows are spectacles of entertainment rather than dowdy industry affairs. But now that Hailey Bieber or Kim Kardashian seem to be modeling for practically everyone, the moment of the big star in the right dress isn’t so surprising. Charli XCX lighting Madonna’s cigarette as they waited for Vaccarello’s show to begin may have inspired pearl-clutching headlines, but it’s those see-through shoes that will generate conversations, raise eyebrows and be talked about for months to come. Spring 2027 is nearly a year away, after all.
Designers are now keen to bring the conversational focus back to the actual fashion on runways, and ideally the clothes shown thereon (or the toes beneath the clothes) — which, as many a business analyst will tell you, fashion execs and brand designers alike are very eager to sell.
Extreme or controversial designs can generate days of initial conversation, especially when the object in question is made for a part of the body that is as much a site of workaday pain as it is fantastical fixation. Our feet are the most practical part of the body we dress, where all else is mere fancy: the cocktail frock decorates; the hat adorns; the suit virilizes; the bra may shape or restrain, but it also entices. To decorate the feet in designer duds, to emphasize their strangeness, their alien qualities that tie us to our distant ape ancestors, with expensive materials and odd shapes, is to walk fashion forward with Darwinian chic.
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