How Exposing Your Feet Became the Hottest Trend in Menswear
This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
After the menswear shows in Paris kicked off with a parade of flip-flops courtesy of Auralee and Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton, designer after designer has shown strikingly minimal foot thongs on the runway.
I’ll admit that when I first noted the emerging trend earlier in the week, I wasn’t convinced. It looked more like a styling trick borrowed from womenswear, a moment rather than a movement, even if retailers have reported strong sandal sales since The Row dropped a $700 rubber flip-flop (which promptly went viral). Menswear has only recently embraced the fisherman’s sandal, a sturdy and dressy design that looks like a well-ventilated brogue and hardly bares your piggies to the world.
And then, on Wednesday, I spoke with Rick Owens just before the opening of his retrospective at the Palais Galliera. Even on vacation, the designer wears his signature black platform boots, but in the quiet museum Owens told me that he recently launched an OnlyFans for his feet. Then we watched a short film installation depicting the iconoclastic fashion legend’s bare puppies stroking a human skull. Hmm, I thought. Maybe menswear is actually entering its toe era.
Only Owens would cop to an interest in foot fetishism (or at least in selling feet pics). But the week was only just getting started. There were leather flip-flops at Julian Klausner’s excellent men’s debut for Dries Van Noten on Thursday, which evoked the loose, messy elegance of watching the sunrise on the beach after a prom or wedding night. Meanwhile, Lemaire featured skimpy leather flats laced to the foot with rustic cord, which tied into what Christophe Lemaire described as “this idea of a kind of new age guy, a kind of new hippie.”
Also thinking of the beach was Kiko Kostadinov, who recently spent his honeymoon in Okinawa and came inspired by the “rough,” and “very, very hot” Japanese island. On Saturday morning, his models, some in business-y, Japan-tailored suits, wore what looked like futuristic Rainbows (complete with toe socks) as they walked through a room full of sand Kostadinov trucked into the raw concrete venue. This was tropical footwear not for the beach but for the city.
The thong trend spans brands big and small, conceptual and artisanal. Later that afternoon, Hermès’s longtime men’s designer Veronique Nichanian unveiled leather sandals that looked just as wearable in Paris as St. Tropez, luxe enough to pass muster with the snootiest maître d’ anywhere. As Nichanian sunnily relayed post-show, she was thinking about “Just a summer in the city! A nice guy in the city, cool and happy!” (She then switched to French, and I caught the phrase “sexy a la plage!”)
By that point, any personal skepticism had completely melted away. Literally—the second half of Paris Fashion Week has been boiling hot. It being France, most show venues are not air conditioned. And it being fashion week, they’re jam-packed with bodies in big fits rather than strictly weather appropriate attire. Come Friday evening, even the whoosh of a passing model felt like a relief at Willy Chavarria, and by the time I found my seat inside Comme des Garçons’s absolutely baking venue, I was seriously contemplating what would happen if they found my sweaty corpse in the second row. All of a sudden, the thonged sandals of the season looked seriously enticing.
And it just so happened that I brought a pair with me. I had actually forgotten that I tucked a pair of nylon-webbing Bedrock hiking sandals in my suitcase for a post-Fashion Week recharge in Marseilles. That’s why I bought them: for the beach. The paper thin-soled sandals are much more Missoula, Montana (where Bedrock is based) than Miu Miu.
