Vibram Five Fingers: the Barefoot Shoes on Everyone’s Feet in 2025?
By Lauren CochraneIn fashion, the concept of the ugly shoe has had a good run. Over the last decade or so, there’s been the Dad sandal, the heeled Croc, and even, in 2024, a proper Frankenshoe: the loafer sneaker, aka the ‘snoafer’. So, as our eyes become accustomed to these clunky shapes, as they become the norm, it’s time to – ahem, sorry – step things up. Take the floor … Vibram Five Fingers.
A shoe with a pocket for each toe, the Five Fingers was first launched by the outdoorsy brand in 2006 – a design to mimic what it is like to walk barefoot. Before its recent fashion moment, the design might have either prompted nausea or a desire for a hike, depending on who was looking at it. Now, however, it’s become an unlikely influence on fashionable footwear, and where it’s going for 2025.
Balenciaga collaborated with Vibram on its own version of the Five Fingers in 2020, there’s a Coperni sparkled shoe that uses the same toe-focused device, and one from Adidas as well. More recently, Balenciaga has taken the Five Fingers and countered it with what might be called a one finger – or toe. The Zero, showcased in the brand’s SS25 lookbook, is a shoe that holds its wearer’s foot by its big toe only, with a sole almost invisible. It’s so extreme that it’s made ripples within the industry – prompting Vogue Business to speculate that “barefoot shoes could be big business in 2025”.
The Zeros are also following the rise of another fashion oddity: the Margiela Tabi. Originally designed in 1988, the cloven hoof-style design was long a favourite of the arty fashion crowd but seen as too weird beyond that. That’s changed in the 2020s. The Tabi became so popular that it led to the ‘Tabi swiper’, the story that spread on social media around the theft of a pair of Mary Jane Tabis in New York in 2023.
With the Margiela design now a classic of the ‘fashion girl’ shoe, – much in the way Manolos were to the SATC generation – said fashion girls are looking around for what’s next. Liana Satenstein dubbed a Khaite shoe with a hole in the top as “the friskiest shoe I have ever seen” while Emma Hope Allwood asked recently: “are vibram five fingers the new tabis?” in her newsletter, off brand.
If there’s some kind of insidery taste level involved here – a desire to push aesthetics – there’s also something of a serious undertone too; one that allows women to subtly subvert ideas of what they should wear, by switching out conventionally ‘pretty’ footwear for something drawn from the weirder, maybe straight functional, side of the factory.
Within the hiking world from which the Vibram Five Fingers is taken, the shoe is something practical. In a fashion context, though, they look different. Especially when they are wilfully contrasted with, say, Simone Rocha frills, or the sexpot feel of a PVC trouser; aesthetically, as far from the stilettos – central to the clichéd male fantasy of glamorous women – as it’s possible to get. “i have a confession, and one i’m not sure how the nice foot guys who email me about my heels will take,” writes Hope Allwood. “This week i am resisting the urge to slip all ten of my toes into a pair of vibram five finger shoes.”
Arguably, it’s this ick factor that really nails them as the most fashionable footwear for women in 2025. On the back of films like The Substance and now Nightbitch, the grotesque – whether through melting body parts or afterdark dog alter egos – is becoming increasingly relevant symbolism when it comes to expressing women’s experience. Taking a satirical tone, it exaggerates the feeling of being reduced to merely a body through everyday objectification, and touches on the – cue Barbie speech – perverse trap that is female life now. Wearing shoes that gross some people out might seem like the latest lark of those in the fashion bubble but, but seen in this context, that grossness could and should be a kind of power. And if that’s all too much to contemplate looking down at your feet, just think – your chiropodist would approve.
Lauren Cochrane is Senior Fashion Writer of The Guardian and contributes to publications including The Face, ELLE, Service95, Konfekt and Mr Porter. Based in London, she writes about everything from catwalk shows to footballers’ style and the linguistics of Love Island. She is author of The Ten: The Stories Behind the Fashion Classics. You can read all of Lauren’s writing on Something Curated here.
Header image courtesy Vibram.