Just when you thought the unorthodox footwear trend had reached its apex with the big red boot, a new weird little bitch is in town: her name is Toe Uggs. We need the toe Uggs. Don’t ask questions, we just do. The new silhouette from Ugg and Chinese designer Victor Wong is perhaps designed to make us uncomfortable, sure, with its big, bulbous, metal metatarsals in gold and silver. But it’s a nice kind of discomfort, superior to the experience of seeing actual human feet.
With this, actual human feet are over. A thing of the past. Old school, and not in the ‘we’ll return to this in a decade and call it cool again’ way — we never want to see them again. On public transport, on the street, those flip-flops and sandals you’re wearing — pack them away! From now on, the only toes we want to see are the metal kind. Thank you Ugg and Victor, you’ve answered our prayers.
The link-up has seen Victor breathe new, toe-y life into a classic Ugg silhouette. The Fluff Oh Yeah — a riff on the Fluff Yeahs, a favourite of celebrities like Gigi Hadid and Hailey Baldwin — is a summer-friendly style. Now, the clock is ticking to see who will be the first to brave the phalange-forward version.
We’re fascinated for a number of reasons, but most particularly through the frame of practicality. How do the metal toes function? Are our actual toes concealed underneath the big toes on display? Do our actual toes enter the toes? What we do know, though, is that Victor has been kind enough to include a selection of decals so we can give ourselves metal toe pedicures whenever we feel like it.
The silhouette designed by Victor is part of Ugg’s Rising Voices Project, which exists to identify new talent in the fashion industry from across the globe. Hopefully, he has more mad-hatter ideas like this in the can, because we like his outlook. When explaining his thought process behind it, he looked to the words of art critic Stephen Bayley: “The beautiful and the ugly are not opposites, but aspects of the same thing.” Amen!