On a recent Monday, when temperatures in New York City and elsewhere were soaring, Jalil Johnson had to put together an outfit for a business meeting and a lunch. Mr. Johnson, a writer and an influencer in Manhattan, does not have a corporate job. But he still wanted to look presentable and stylish, so he went with a dark blazer, a blue button-up shirt — and flip-flops.
“I think they look fantastic with a suit,” Mr. Johnson, 25, said. He liked the visual contrast created by wearing a blazer with beach sandals, he added, and had been emboldened to dress up his flip-flops after seeing pairs on the runways at the recent men’s wear shows.
Louis Vuitton showed leather flip-flops and Prada had models walk the runway wearing rubber-soled thongs in shades of pale blue and pistachio green.
Auralee’s show featured male and female models wearing colorful two-tone flip-flops that resembled a $690 pair by the Row.
Toes also paraded down the runways at Dries Van Noten, Lemaire, Hermès and Kiko Kostadinov, where thong sandals were paired with toe socks. All of it was a sign that men’s wear was jumping feet first into a trend already permeating women’s wear: From luxury flip-flops to mesh flats to five-toed sneakers, lots of footwear in favor with fashionable people emphasizes the digits also known as little piggies.
Liana Satenstein, 35, a fashion writer in Brooklyn, has been following the industry’s toe-forward trajectory for years. As have publications like British Vogue, which declared in a 2023 headline: “Toes are the new legs.” The “footaissance,” as Ms. Satenstein called it in her Neverworns newsletter, has coincided with other sartorial trends — naked dressing, short shorts — that prescribe leaving little to the imagination.
“Nothing is titillating anymore,” she said. “But there’s something so sensual about feet, from ‘toe cleavage’ to the curve of an ankle.” Unlike the curves achieved via deep-plane face-lifts and other cosmetic surgeries, those of feet and toes are usually natural — something the 63-year-old fashion designer Rick Owens recently alluded to in an interview, when he said he was starting an account for his feet on OnlyFans and described it as “an interesting way of addressing aging.”
In her newsletter, Ms. Satenstein has written about various shoes of this toe-ment. They include thong heels that Phoebe Philo introduced last summer (which Ms. Satenstein called a “sickeningly sexy combination of filth and chaste”); the sneaker-like Vibram FiveFingers (a “fashion girl” favorite, she wrote, and a source of “perpetual phalangeal pleasure”) …
… and Balenciaga’s Zero shoe (a barely-there sandal that, as its name suggests, is not much of a shoe at all).
Ms. Satenstein called a leather peep-toe heel by Khaite the “freakiest” of them all.
Some new thongs nod to earlier styles, like a spangly metallic heel reissued by Jimmy Choo in May. The shoe was first introduced in 2000, when Carrie Bradshaw was running around New York in open-toe Manolo Blahniks on “Sex and the City.” (Open-toe Manolos, as it happens, are also a favorite of Anna Wintour.) Havaianas flip-flops, another nostalgic thong, have been worn by influencers and with collections by labels like Kallmeyer, which featured them on models in its spring 2024 lookbook.
A pair of Yeezy heeled thongs that Kim Kardashian wore out in Los Angeles in 2018, which Ms. Satenstein wrote about for Vogue, were an early sign to her of the toe cleavage to come, she said. The next year, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of the Row fueled interest in showing toe with the release of their label’s nylon-mesh Sock shoe. Since then, shoes that have sustained the interest include the cloven-toe Maison Margiela Tabis, an insider favorite that found a new audience on TikTok after a pair went missing.
As designers like Emme Parsons have incorporated embellishments for toes into their shoes — Ms. Parsons, who lives in Palm Beach, Fla., sells a sandal with a built-in ring — other brands have introduced jewelry to make them shine. Among them is Chan Luu, which hosted a “pedi party” at a salon in Los Angeles last month to promote a new collection of toe rings.
They include styles with hefty Swarovski crystals, which resemble a diamond ring Rihanna wore on her middle toe in 2023. “Bigger is better,” said Tessa Tran, 37, the chief executive of Chan Luu.
The fashion designer Yael Aflalo’s new namesake label also sells a toe ring with a large diamond. It was designed by Leandra Medine Cohen, the fashion writer once known as the Man Repeller, whose own toe-forward footwear includes Havaianas, corded sandals and jelly flip-flops by Ancient Greek Sandals, which she recently wore with an Emilio Pucci swimsuit and nylon surf pants. (“There’s definitely a surf adjacency happening in fashion,” Ms. Medine Cohen said of a factor influencing the current fetish with baring feet.)
When developing the new toe ring, she said, “We thought about a cigar band, but then we decided that an engagement-style solitaire was the most digestible and humorous.”
“Like, are you really going to put a diamond on your toe?” Ms. Medine Cohen, 36, continued. The “contrast of a very casual shoe with the ring feels right,” she added, echoing Mr. Johnson’s sentiments about wearing flip-flops and a suit jacket. “It’s that same contrast, with a delicate piece of jewelry and a hairy toe.”
Top photos by Jimmy Choo, Chan Luu, Liana Satenstein, Pietro D’Aprano/Getty Images, Auralee, Vibram, myfacewheno_o.
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