Over the last two years, FiveFingers has seen a surge in wholesale requests from high-fashion stores. In 2023, the brand collaborated with Japanese fashion label Suicoke, stocked in retailers like Dover Street Market (globally) and Slam Jam. For SS25, Vibram FiveFingers will launch at several stores, including Naked in Copenhagen, Ssense and some other players that are yet to “sign on the dotted line”.
The wider adoption of this style can be traced back to the split-toe Margiela Tabis, which have boomed in recent years, warming people up to avant-garde shoe shapes (every expert interviewed for this story noted the Tabi as a barefoot shoe precursor). Now, early Tabi adopters are looking for the next big thing. “In the past, we’ve seen toe-minded designs from Schiaparelli, Margiela, Loewe, and Celine…The [FiveFingers] is simply another shoe to separate yourself from the Tabi pack, which has become normie in fashion circles,” says New York-based writer and Vogue alum Liana Satenstein, who has become somewhat of a barefoot shoe correspondent in recent months via her newsletter Neverworns.
Satenstein and UK-based writer Georgia Graham, founder of style podcast and newsletter Threads of Conversation, both say they were enticed to buy barefoot shoes by French influencer Melissa Bon. Graham also recalls spotting FiveFingers on the AW24 runway of Berlin designer Marie Lueder.
“Fashion always needs to play with something titillating, and toes are just the new thing. There’s also all this talk about ‘touching grass’ [spending time outdoors, disconnecting from technology], so perhaps touching grass (or concrete) through the thinnest shoes you can is some response to this,” says Graham. “I think that the trend for [barefoot shoes] brings together fashion’s current preoccupation with feet, but also the gorp trend and our current taste for moulded rubber shoes (like Crocs, etc). It’s catching fire because it incorporates a few different trends into one shoe.”
Health and wellness benefits
Fashion aside, many customers are going barefoot for health over aesthetics. Asher and Galahad Clark (seventh-generation members of the Clarks footwear family) founded UK-based barefoot sneaker brand Vivobarefoot in 2010 after discovering the reported health benefits, including improved posture and injury reduction.
“Millions of years of evolution have actually done a fantastic job. And so here we are as shoemakers, going back to that,” says Asher. “For 30 years, the sexiest footwear brands in the world have sold big, chunky, cushioned underfoot technology, when actually your feet have all the technology you need, and all we need to do is get out of the way of it.”