By now, Chanel’s barefoot sandal has saturated the contemporary fashion consciousness, and our algorithms. Functionally, it feels almost useless: it protects the heel of the foot while leaving practically everything else exposed. And that is exactly why it might feel subversive.
Online discourse around the shoe exploded when Margaret Qualley wore it to a premiere. We are used to seeing all sorts of things on the runway, and when the sandal first debuted, it didn’t seem to generate nearly as much attention. It was only once we saw it in movement, removed from the hyper-polished environment of a fashion show, that its absurdity became fully apparent.
Granted, a movie premiere is not exactly real life either, nor is the shoe necessarily designed for it. It is meant to be worn by people who don’t really need to walk, or at least don’t need to walk through spaces that demand practical footwear. Still, as completely new as the design might have initially felt, Jeremy Scott proposed an almost identical idea back in 1999, only his came in heel form, upping the discomfort another notch.
Seeing Blazy’s sandal and Scott’s heel side by side made me think about the importance of timing. Whatever happened back then, the impact of Scott’s naked shoe was nowhere near as strong as the one we are witnessing now, despite proposing essentially the same avant-garde idea decades earlier.
Blazy, however, proposed the frontless sandal at a moment when weird shoes are popping off everywhere. Fashion voices have been pointing toward increasingly strange footwear for around two years now, with Mandy Lee among the early proponents of what has come to be called the “freaky shoe” movement, while Mexican writer Fashion Memo has written about fashion’s ongoing love affair with feet.
This is not to say Scott’s version went unnoticed. The shoe was immortalized by photographers like Norbert Schoerner and worn by cultural icons including Kylie Minogue and Faye Wong, among its most recognizable wearers. But, like so many things in fashion, it eventually disappeared into the archive, only for the idea to resurface decades later through Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, and subsequently be reinterpreted by others.
Jeffrey Campbell, for example, has already offered its own variation, while fast-fashion brands have begun doing the same, proving just how quickly a high-concept design can filter into mass consumption. Could it only be a matter of time before the idea reaches Shein? Or will mass fashion understand that the entire appeal of the design lies precisely in its niche absurdity?
We constantly hear that fashion should be about wearability, yet so much of the fashion that enters our collective memory was never primarily concerned with being wearable. Who truly remembers the perfectly made pair of jeans when you haveMcQueen’s wood-like brown leather corset from his No. 13 collection? And yet, what ultimately sells is often precisely the perfectly made pair of trousers. Fashion has always existed within a delicate balance between wearability and fantasy, the clothes that sustain the business and those that sustain our imagination are not always the same.
When people say that everything has been done before, it is because, to an extent, it has. This cycle of reinvention through inspiration is constant across fashion history, where ideas are borrowed and recontextualized until a different time, creator or cultural context allows them to resonate anew.
Which brings me back to timing.
When Jeremy Scott proposed a sole-less heel in 1999, it could function as anti-establishment provocation. Transfer an almost identical proposition to Chanel decades later and the context transforms its meaning: what once read as raw rebellion can just as easily become a symbol of luxury and status.
The sandal also arrives in an already oversaturated fashion sphere, where unexpected objects are almost guaranteed to become images, memes and talking points. Its success as an image therefore depends on more than the supposed radicality of the design itself. Timing, cultural appetite, the house producing it, the person wearing it and the machinery circulating it all become part of the equation.
Perhaps this has less to do with the object itself and more to do with who is making it, when, and what they have to say.
Because this does not apply to every contemporary fashion proposal. Matières Fécales, for example, still feels genuinely subversive to me, even within today’s virality-seeking machine. Their universe as a whole exists in opposition to many of the conventions fashion has historically relied upon. Even the name is a statement in itself, chosen by founders Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran as a rejection of what they saw as the superficial and wasteful nature of the fashion industry. From the beginning, they have also resisted the status a label can give an object, wanting people to engage with their work through its quality and craftsmanship rather than a logo or brand name.
This makes the provocation feel less like an isolated gesture and more like a language. Their Fall/Winter 2026 collection, The One Percent, directly confronted extreme wealth by turning it into satire, with exaggerated proportions, prosthetic makeup and distorted tailoring transforming the figures before us into dystopian caricatures of the very elite they were critiquing. Their custom designs for Gabbriette, who became their first bride, translated that same universe into bridalwear, another category deeply attached to its own ideas of beauty, femininity and tradition. Their “post-human” aesthetic is not simply something strange enough to generate an image; it is part of a larger rejection of the conventions they have been pushing against from the beginning.
The provocation, then, feels inseparable from the people behind the brand and from what they have, or perhaps need, to say. And maybe that is where the difference lies. A strange object can provoke on its own, but subversion requires something to push against.
Matières Fécales has built an entire identity around rejecting the systems it critiques.
Chanel, meanwhile, is one of the institutions through which fashion itself has historically been defined. The irony is that Chanel’s own identity was once rooted in rebellion, rejecting conventions of women’s dress and challenging what fashion was supposed to look like and do. But does that rebellious identity survive once the rebel becomes the institution?
What does Chanel, of all houses, have left to subvert? Can a brand of that scale, history and cultural authority still position itself against the system when it has become one of the institutions defining it? Perhaps success does not eliminate the possibility of subversion, but it inevitably complicates it.
Credits
Written by Ligia Ponce @babybangs__
Cover: Winde Rienstra, photo by Team Peter Stigter