How separating my toes changed my life

This is about shoegaze

Alright, footfreaks. It’s finally gotten above 60 degrees in New York, and that means it’s time to look down and take serious stock of the piggies. At the risk of sounding like a fortune cookie, life takes you down winding and increasingly obscure roads, roads that make you think, “God how did I get here, I thought NYC was a grid system.” On one of those roads, I became the poster-child for Vibram five finger toes. My hankering for toe separation has been well-documented in places that range from the Substack of patron saint of trend-spotting Liana Satenstein to WSJ to Dazed to Pinterest.

It started in middle school with my friend *REDACTED*. We were the dorkiest kids in school. I didn’t own a single pair of pants with buttons, and he only owned shoes that attracted disgust and scorn (Vibrams, velcro, discomfiting boy toe-cleavage). From high on my horse I thought, Well I may be lame and unchic and bad at math and also semi-illiterate, but at least my feet are contained safely within their unfortunately-patterned Hot Topic socks. I possessed a general apathy towards my feet that extended to their casings. For years I regarded this as fine: There is no normal way to feel about your feet.

Flash forward into the future. It’s 2020. My style is somewhere between the Frans (Fine and Lebowitz) while my personality remains with the Elaines (May and Benes). I buy clothes left and right, but my shoepathy remains. Sure, I have some cute pairs that I wear, but shoes just don’t call to me. They are either comfortable or uncomfortable, practical or impractical.

The summer of 2023 arrives. I am about to go on a birthday trip with my gorpcore-lite boyfriend. For a present he asks for Vibrams. The twist? He wants us to match. (Everybody wants a relationship with no-swag gap until your diva boyfriend starts giving shoe opinions.) Reluctantly I shell out $200 dollars for the monstrosities. Second twist (you didn’t know M. Night Shyamalan was ghost-writing this newsletter?): I love them! My feelings about my feet change forever! I finally am able to see them as a true extension of my body, in part because I can literally feel them, and so I am able to style them. Suddenly I became a “shoe girl.” At the point of writing I have so many shoes I am LARPing as the little old lady who lived in a shoe.

Today, I am ready to break ground on what will be my fourth Vibe summer, yet the issue of what shoe to wear in the heat comes for us all. I forced the entire i-D office (at threat of me stomping on their toes) to tell me what they’re wearing this summer:

Thom Bettridge (Editor-in-Chief):

“With all the buzz around Chanel’s heel-only sandal, I’ve been inspired to revisit a shoe I bought in Kyoto two years ago (I’m gatekeeping the store, sorry). It’s designed to cover only right past the ball of your foot, leaving the heel hovering just above God’s green earth. So yes, this thing that looks like a child’s sandal is actually a US13.”

Steff Yotka (Global Editorial Director):

“It’s my winter shoe—Prada monolith lace-ups—imagined as my summer shoe—Prada monolith sandals. I am an all-year, all-terrain fussbett adherent.”

Alex Kessler (Deputy Editor):

“Claiming the no cap non sandal sandal à la Chanel.”

Marley Wendt (Associate Editor):

“I dream of drinking a crisp sprite on the beach in these coral Valentino stud flip flops.”

Douglas Greenwood (Entertainment Editor):

“I got this little berries and cream moment in a vintage shop called Reign on Berwick Street in London to wear to my birthday party. I never did, and feared them for the first month they sat in my shoe rack. The heel’s just a little ostentatious but I’m loving the clip-clop sound they make.”

Flora Medina (Associate Editor):

“For personal reasons, I cannot wear an open toed shoe away from the beach. I dream of these flip-flop adjacent tabi slippers constantly.”

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• I get a lot of messages from wonderful young writers who want to have a coffee, and I feel terrible because it would be my full year’s caffeine limit if I agreed to every single one. Instead I have decided to host “Office Hours” where I will sit from 11 a.m.-3p.m. at Bar Oliver on June 6th absolutely pounding espresso and whoever wants to join me can come by and chat. This could go south, or it could turn into a remake of My Dinner with Andre.

• This photo story on the Dallas Cowboy auditions by Taryn Segal is one of my favorite things we’ve run recently.

• Very into this piece on automatized writing. I’ve always felt that studying Oulipo in college made me a better poster.

• Finally…submissions are open for our literary contest!!!