Last week, Balenciaga released its Spring/Summer 2025 lookbook and viewers noticed something was afoot. Many of the models were wearing what looked like a thin insole, almost invisible to the naked eye, only held to the foot by the big toe.
Enter the Zero, Balenciaga’s ultralight 3D-moulded barefoot sandal, which the brand says “distils footwear to its essence”. It will retail at €350. The comments on (Balenciaga supported Instagram) Demnagram’s post of the shoes ranged from the positive (“Whatever this is, I want it”) to the incredulous (“what r u playing at?”). The brand declined to comment on the reaction.
Love them or hate them, barefoot shoes are becoming big business. At their most practical, these shoes are designed to increase contact between the wearer and the ground and allow space for toes to spread. Giving rise to brands like Vibram FiveFingers and Vivobarefoot, the barefoot shoe market is set to reach almost $800 million by 2031, per Allied Market Research, up 40 per cent on its current size. And it’s influencing the wider footwear space: from JW Anderson’s paw shoes to Phoebe Philo’s soft square-toe shoes, we’re increasingly seeing thin-soled, wide-set shoes, or shoes that expose the toes, enter the mainstream.
From the Tabi to the toe shoe: The birth of barefoot
The barefoot trend has been brewing for a while: Balenciaga collaborated with Vibram FiveFingers (whose shoes split at every toe like a glove) to create a heeled version in 2020.
Originally designed for climbing and outdoor pursuits, the FiveFingers have transitioned from a niche shoe that is popular primarily with men seeking performance to a label attracting the fashion crowd with a growing female consumer base. “When I joined, women in Europe and the US would never wear FiveFingers. It’s a divisive product,” says FiveFingers global manager Carmen Marani. “Aesthetically, it was not so easy to walk around with visible toes, which was a barrier [to entry] for most consumers. But now things are changing. Now, the toes are the things you have to show.”
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.”
Vivobarefoot specialises in wide-set, thin “barefoot” soled sneakers (without toe splits) for everyday life or for sports. The brand sold 1 million pairs of barefoot shoes in 2023, with sales up 25 per cent on the previous year. When discussing the brand, it came to light that one Gen Z member of the Vogue Business team recently bought a pair (costing £90) after a TikToker said they were good for weightlifting because you feel more grounded and stable.
Clark sees Vivobarefoot as one of many brands tapping into the growing wellness movement, as people seek to optimise every aspect of their health, from sleep to nutrition to exercise. “All of these things are ultimately just about getting as close to feeling a bit more human, feeling more present. Vivobarefoot is the below-the-ankle solution to the natural health mindset.”
Will it last?
Vivobarefoots look a little different to the Zero, but nonetheless, Demna’s co-sign is sometimes impactful when it comes to silhouette. The designer was an early proponent of the chunky sneaker when Balenciaga’s XXL dad sneaker, the Triple S, exploded onto the scene in 2017. Arguably, it was a precursor to the chunky soles we see in the sneaker world today, from On’s Cloud Monster or Hoka Ones. “There’s only one way you can go when you’re up and that’s down, right? So I do anticipate a shift to [barefoot],” Clark says. “And obviously, it’s going to be helped with moves from the likes of Demna.”
“I definitely think we’re seeing the return of a more delicate shoe, which dovetails with the FiveFinger trend,” Graham concurs. “If the Mschf [big red] boots were the peak of the big shoe trend, now we’re coming back down the other side of the mountain.” You can see this trickling into the mainstream in the sneaker world, she adds, where low-profile sneakers like the Puma Mostro, Speedcats and the Adidas Taekwondo are becoming more popular.
As we’ve seen before, footwear silhouette trends ebb and flow. Even sneakers like the Jordan or Dunks finally fell out of favour recently after decades of demand. Are barefoot labels worried this is a flash-in-the-pan?
“I think the [barefoot] trend will continue to grow, although whether they’ll stay cool or not is another matter. People pile onto trends so fast these days that niche appeal can get flattened by the mainstream quite easily,” says Graham. “I still love my FiveFingers, and they’re super comfy, so I’d be down to buy another pair. But I will wear them less if they become too ubiquitous. I guess that’s Vibram’s real challenge now that the shoes are growing in popularity. How can they ensure the hype is sustained?”
Marani is conscious of the risks of the trend cycle but confident in FiveFingers’s non-aesthetic benefits. “We don’t gift products, so the influencers wearing FiveFingers, they bought on their own,” she says. “It’s really life-changing, the way they feel, without their toes squashed and overlapping. This is what we’re trying to do as a brand. We want to leverage the fashion trend, but at the same time, we want to keep focusing on performance and making sure that people understand what the product is about.”
As for the Balenciaga pair, the brand confirmed the Zero sandal will retail for AW25. “The Zero seems more like a concept shoe rather than something practical that you can wear around a lot,” says Graham. “But I haven’t tried them on, so perhaps they’re very functional too? The thing about Vibrams is that the shoe is born of practicality — it was a gorp shoe for outdoorsy types before the fashion girlies sunk their teeth into it. So I think the genesis of the style is different, even if both are in fashion’s foot family.”
“My upstairs neighbour who works in shoe design DM’d me after seeing me post the [Zero] on stories and said they are incredible from an engineering standpoint. They are. They are hanging on by a toe coil!” Satenstein says. “Perhaps they ll produce it in full coverage commercially? In that case, I think the Zero has legs — or rather, feet.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
