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Girl, have you seen some of the stuff the fashion industry is asking us to put on our feet these days?
Valentino is selling a $1,100 pump that leaves two toes exposed, sculpting one's foot into a cloven pig's hoof. Hailey Bieber is apparently a fan.
Chanel recently unveiled "sandals" that cradle the heel but leave sole, ball and toes fully unsheathed. These are shoes only in the sense that chaps are pants or crotchless panties are shorts.
Even Tory Burch, a brand usually associated with chic urbanity, is selling a mule that has been pierced at the tip with a thick ring of silver. It's a bit like seeing your overachieving daughter come home from college with her septum pierced.
And on social media, people are losing their minds and scratching their heads over more theoretical designs from experimental designers: a shoe with a beam of light for a heel from Monamobile, Kobi Levi's mind-bending trompe l'oeil high heel that looks like a bifurcated sneaker, and all manner of blocky postindustrial foot riggings from Chanté Orrett-Gage's BA show at London's prestigious Central Saint Martins school of design.
Do you love them? Hate them? Either way, you cannot turn away. That's the point.
While the luxury fashion market as a whole is contracting, the luxury footwear market is growing. For many fashion brands, attracting shoe shoppers is part of their survival strategy. And capturing a shopper's attention is a tall order in a crowded and fast-moving social media landscape.
"It's very cynical, I have to say. It's just that all designers are looking for that moment on Instagram, that viral design," said Lars Byrresen Petersen, who runs a popular shoe meme account. "And I feel terrible saying that because I actually think those shoes are really fun, and I obviously love all of them."
This is true: Petersen really loves weird shoes. His Lars LaLa Instagram account has attracted 139,000 followers by spotlighting shoes that resemble condoms, horse legs and "Looney Tunes" characters.
And he puts his money where his feet are. He wears high heels every day and has recently released his own "heel jewels," sheaths for stilettos that look like little hydrangeas.
Today, social media may incentivize novel design. But there's precedent for eye-catching footwear.
"If you look through history, everything is cyclical," Petersen said. "And if you go back way before the heel even, there were crazy shoes, and they were a tool to differentiate class."
Petersen gave two examples: chopines, the towering platform shoes that originated in Europe during the 15th century, worn by women to accentuate the length of their skirts; and poulaines, extremely pointy shoes favored by the upper classes during the Middle Ages.
"Those were all regulated in length," said Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. "The higher you were in society, the longer the pointed toe could be."
"Comme des Garçons did a version a few years ago," she added, referring to a 2015 men's collection from the avant-garde label.
Steele sees today's outré shoe designs as part of a decades-long trend. "So many kinds of shoes, especially over the last 20 years, have become deliberately strange," she said. "Since the worst thing in fashion is to be seen as bourgeois and behind the times, you want to be doing something that's new and different, pushing the envelope."
Besides, a woman can remain conventionally beautiful in her hair and makeup while wearing even the most experimental shoes. "They're far away from your face, so they're not making you look ugly," she said.
A key figure in the Great Weird-ening of shoes is Martin Margiela, the late, enigmatic fashion designer who introduced the split-toe Tabi at his first Maison Margiela runway show in 1988. Margiela was inspired by shoes worn by Japanese workers in the 15th century. Many others, including Kiko Kostadinov, Steve Madden and Nike, have been inspired by Margiela's Tabi.
"There's a reflexology reason as to why Tabis are so dear to me," Petersen said. "Once you separate your big toe from the rest of your toes, you increase your balance, but you also balance your heart chakra."
But many cuckoo shoe designs aren't great for balance, chakra or otherwise. Steele fondly remembers wearing a pair of platforms designed by Noritaka Tatehana, who made a splash decades ago with stacked shoes favored by fashion plates such as Daphne Guinness and Lady Gaga.
"I could stand in them for a total of 20 minutes in excruciating pain before I had to take them off and kick on some nice, comfortable five-inch-high heels, where I could actually rest on the heel instead of balancing on the balls of my feet," Steele said.\
Ah, yes, at the end of a long day, who wouldn't want to slip into a pair of comfers-cozy five-inch heels?
It's hard to look at some of the more extreme designs making waves on social media without wondering if there's something sadistic or misogynistic at play.
"Well, unless you're a Japanese female office worker whose office mandates that you have to wear high heels, no woman today has to wear a high heel," Steele said. "So it's clearly a question of women playing the pros and cons of what's comfortable."
Besides, even the most comfortable shoe can be shocking.
When Steele included a pair of sandals in her first shoe exhibition at the Museum at FIT in 1999, she remembers a horrified reaction from a Brazilian TV journalist.
"She rushed over to the Birkenstocks and said, ‘No Latin woman would wear shoes like that,'" Steele said. "'They're just so ugly.'"
Shane O'Neill connects the dots between entertainment news, internet fads, celebrity gossip and pop culture ephemera to sketch a portrait of how we live today.
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