There’s no precise word in the English language for the feeling of simultaneous disgust and curiosity. But if there was, dictionaries would surely include Italian brand Vibram’s FiveFingers as an example of something that elicits such a feeling. The shoes were designed with function, not style, in mind – a “barefoot” shoe for serious runners and hikers.
But recently, they’ve been cropping up on the feet of fashion’s well-heeled elite. Clockwise from left: Georgia Graham in her FiveFingers, influencer Melissa Bon and Balenciaga’s collaboration with Vibram. Georgia Graham, founder of Threads of Conversation , a podcast and newsletter exploring the stories we tell through style, loves her FiveFingers.
“I think that the Vibrams are like the weird girl in ’90s high school movies, the one who gets sneered at by the cool kids, but ends up being cooler than all of them,” she said. The functional footwear’s incursion into the mainstream fashion world began in 2020, when Balenciaga sent male models down the runway in the webbed shoes. A version of the collaboration was later spotted on singer Rihanna.
This year, Vibram FiveFingers has teamed up with designers such as Kiko Kostadinov and Ottolinger, a sure sign we’re about to see a lot more of the shoe. But they’re not the first instance of fashion’s fetish for phalanges. Perhaps the most infamous of toe shoes are Martin Margiela’s Tabis.
Designed and named after Japanese worker’s shoes thought to have .