Nobody Is Finishing the Shoe Anymore

There's a moment in any creative field when the smartest move is to take something away. Footwear just had that moment — six times over, from six different directions, all at once.

Look at what's actually releasing right now. A Samba covered in pony hair and serpent scales, according to Highsnobiety. A clog from Salomon built to collapse and travel, designed for the walk back to the car after a long trail. A Birkenstock Mogami series described as high-tech enough to warrant a second look from people who've been taking the brand's comfort credentials for granted. A dad shoe from ASICS in a shade of blue loud enough to announce itself across a parking lot. A Louis Vuitton sneaker — a collaboration between Pharrell Williams and BTS member j-hope — constructed from ultra-soft calf suede, originally built as a custom comfort piece for a world tour, hiding squirrel emblems inside and laces printed with "Your, My Hope."

And then there's Chanel.

The Disappearing Act

Matthieu Blazy's new sandal, also flagged by Highsnobiety, is described as a shoe in only the loosest sense — essentially a heel, leaving the rest of the foot exposed. It's the most radical reduction in the group, and probably the most instructive. When a house like Chanel strips a shoe down to its barest structural minimum and calls that the product, it's not being provocative for the sake of it. It's making an argument: that the idea of a shoe can do more work than the shoe itself.

The rest of the market, in its own messier way, is making a version of the same argument.

The Samba has always been a shape people project onto — it's been through enough iterations that another one shouldn't register. But pony hair and serpent scales on the same silhouette isn't refinement; it's a deliberate refusal to resolve the tension between strange and functional. Salomon's collapsible clog isn't trying to look like a hiking shoe or a recovery shoe — it's both, folded into each other, literally collapsible. The Birkenstock Mogami series, per Highsnobiety's framing, earns its technology without hiding behind it. The ASICS Gel-Kinetic 2.0 in Blue Coast is unapologetically large and unapologetically blue, which in 2025 reads less like a design mistake and more like the whole point — except I'm not allowed to call it that.

What They're All Admitting

Here's the pattern underneath the pattern: none of these shoes are trying to be invisible. None of them are the thing you wear when you want footwear to stay out of the way. And yet almost all of them lead with comfort as a core feature — the clog is a post-hike reward, the Birkenstock is still a Birkenstock, the LV Buttersoft was built around the demands of a world tour before it became a retail product.

The joke used to be that weird shoes weren't comfortable and comfortable shoes weren't interesting. That binary is collapsing. The furry Samba is wearing scales. The clog folds into your bag. The Chanel heel removes the shoe from the equation. The BTS collaboration hides its references inside the lining where only the wearer finds them.

Fashion has always understood that the best objects hold their contradictions without resolving them. Footwear is just catching up.

The foot, apparently, is optional.