Then there’s also the snoafer (the sneaker and loafer), which The Wall Street Journal coined “the footwear equivalent of the spork”. It doesn’t stop there: there’s also the sock-boot, the clog-trainer and the wedge-trainer, once a staple of the 00s and now cautiously back.
The cloven-toe shoe
A main character in this story is the cloven-toe shoe. Laughably gross to many, the split-toe design has been wending its way on to fashion-lovers’ feet around the world for years now thanks to the renaissance of Maison Margiela’s Tabi shoes. Debuted in 1988 and inspired by 15th-Century Japananese sock design, their impact has been seismic. And you’d now be hard pushed to find a trainer brand not offering some kind of cloven design.
A deliberately awkward, hybrid or unexpected shoe can break the stiffness of an outfit and make someone look less overly polished – J’Nae Phillips
But perhaps the most hyperbolic of all ugly shoes, tellingly designed by an art collective more for the sake of generating memes than protecting metatarsals, is the MSCHF big red boot, worn by many street stylers after they were launched in 2023.
Some of these strange shoes are as much stunt as shoe. As J’Nae Phillips, creator of the Fashion Tingz newsletter, tells the BBC: “people increasingly enjoy fashion items that provoke reactions, become conversational objects, or function almost like visual memes”.
The “jelly” clog is among the weird and wonderful styles that have originated from gardening clogs.
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