When it involves summer season type muses, Jane Birkin in a pair of woven sandals or plimsoll sneakers strolling round Provence was as soon as the perennial reference. However change is afoot. This summer season’s largest footwear muses embody kayakers and barefoot working lovers.
Essentially the most stunning but desired footwear in vogue proper now embody rubber flip-flops, neoprene slip-on water footwear and Vibram’s FiveFingers, a glove-like health shoe that punctuates every particular person toe.
Final week, Lyst launched an inventory of the preferred gadgets being looked for and purchased on-line within the second quarter of 2025. Six out of the ten prime gadgets had been footwear, together with The Row’s £670 flip-flops (as worn by the Jurassic World actor Jonathan Bailey on the crimson carpet), pale suede boat footwear from Miu Miu, mesh-style jelly slippers and people aforementioned toe-pocketed footwear from Vibram, whose followers embody the rapper Doechii and Blackpink’s Jennie.
Welcome to ugly shoe summer season. Dal Chodha, a lecturer at London’s Central Saint Martins vogue faculty who as an adolescent wore Nike Air Rift trainers that includes a break up toe, describes the pattern as “polarising”.
“There may be a lot numbness to how we eat one another’s type right now,” he says. “I relish the jolt of anyone going ‘what’s that?’ or seeing somebody balk.”
Now, he favours Vivobarefoot’s Achilles sandals that splinter and body the large toe from the foot’s different digits. “I like when a shoe makes me query if one thing is sweet or will get me out of my very own style bubble. Ugly footwear are provocative.”
Throughout Copenhagen vogue week, which wrapped up on Friday, bizarre footwear dominated the streets and catwalks.
At OperaSport, fashions wore plastic flip-flops that had a rounded toe cap, the results of a brand new collaboration between the Brazilian model Havaianas and the 3D printing firm Zellerfeld. Rave Evaluate added tufts of deadstock materials and ribbons to pairs of track-and-field working trainers from Puma, whereas Nicklas Skovgaard styled bouncy tulle attire with black patent heeled clogs from the orthopaedic footwear model Scholl.
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Outdoors the exhibits, there was every part from battered and buckled knee-high biker boots to trekking trainers from Merrell and Keen Uneeks – a fusion of a braided sandal and canvas coach topped with a bungee wire toggle. Rubber wellingtons from Chanel, kitten heels with seen spongy insoles, embellished Crocs, ghillies-style dancing footwear and varied cross-pollinated ballet flats together with “sneakerinas” and “jellyrinas” had been additionally in abundance.
However it was the toe-spreading types from Vibram, which begin from £105, that had been most favoured. Fia Hamelijnck, a Dutch-based artistic director, initially purchased hers for a mountaineering vacation. Now she wears them to the grocery store, health club and vogue exhibits. “I can see folks’s eyes widening as they spot them,” she says. “They’re ugly. However I like that. It’s sudden.”
The catalyst of the divisive pattern may be traced again to Maison Margiela’s split-toe tabi footwear, impressed by Fifteenth-century Japanese thong footwear and first launched in 1988. After a viral TikTok in 2023 a couple of girl’s Tinder date stealing hers, the type entered mainstream dialog. Now it’s as ubiquitous as a pair of Converse trainers.
“A part of the unique appeal of a tabi-style shoe was to freak folks out,” Choda says. “At present they don’t actually repulse any extra. So folks want to push that needle even additional.”
Twenty years after the Italian firm Vibram first launched its barefoot types, searches for secondhand pairs on Depop are up 296% since April. Balenciaga’s Zero shoe consists of a 3D-moulded sole with a logoed huge toe enclosure. Khaite’s backless mules embody a peep gap that exposes the wearer’s huge toe, whereas Tory Burch sells sliders with an inbuilt steel huge toe ring. On Thursday, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami launched a variety of vibrant cutout sliders bearing his signature grinning flower motif at Selfridges.
Ruby Redstone, a vogue historian and proprietor of the style retailer Mess in New York Metropolis, says “bizarre” footwear have all the time been in vogue, pointing to medieval flats with exaggerated pointed toes and elaborate French Rococo-style embellished heels as examples.
After all, like magnificence, ugliness is subjective however Redstone says there was a noticeable change in how folks classify “what a flattering or useful shoe is” with “a yearning for one thing even weirder and within the know”.
“Ugly is such a contentious phrase,” provides Choda. “These sort of footwear are often utilized by those that don’t need to conform to tendencies and even gender norms. The irony is, they’ve now turn out to be a pattern in themselves.”