For too long designers have pledged their allegiance to the body beautiful: baring the hips, waist, and breasts with swooping cutouts, thigh slits, and dental-floss straps. It means a new sort of seduction has emerged on the spring-summer 2024 catwalks, focusing on an alternative erogenous zone that tends to inspire as much repulsion as it does intrigue. That is the human toe—long and naked and fending for itself.
This season designers like Elena Velez, Ricky Wesley Harriott, Donatella Versace, Daniel Lee, and Aaron Esh have exposed the foot with a transgressive attitude: all open-toed loafers, comma-shaped flip-flops and single-digit socks that go beyond staid notions of sexiness. Just last night Kylie Jenner wore a look from Sportmax’s latest offering that included some faintly clinical pedi-spreaders. Presenting the toes flaunted and flexed, this footwear is perhaps the logical evolution of Miu Miu’s controversial and full-frontal thong boot.
Much like the Tabi boot, this kind of thing feels deliberately distasteful, all while maintaining a frisson of playfulness and provocation. “The foot is an erotic organ and the shoe is its sexual covering,” podiatric scientist William Rossi once said. “The human foot possesses a natural sexuality whose powers have borne remarkable influence on people of all cultures.” An erotically charged shoe, like Kylie Jenner’s, is therefore about finding pleasure in the perverse, about splashing in the slipstream between dread and desire.
