The History of The
Tabi Boot

Martin Margiela wanted a shoe that gave the illusion of a bare foot resting on a heel. The heel is chunky and high from the side but narrow from the front, and the leather was a traditionally masculine choice. The clasps that run up the inner part of the boots were references to the original design he pulled from—he had just come back from a trip to Japan when he designed his own. Prior to founding his own label in 1988, Margiela had worked for Jean Paul Gaultier, and before that had his own line of shoes. When it came time to create footwear for the first Maison Martin Margiela collection, though, no cobbler would take his tabi design on—the split toe was too radical for traditional workshops. As fate would have it, it was Geert Bruloot, the first retailer who stocked Margiela’s pre-Gaultier shoes at his Antwerp boutique Cocodrillo, who would introduce him to his future cobbler: an Italian craftsman named Mr. Zagato. According to Bruloot, he showed Mr. Zagato the tabi prototype over dinner, and the cobbler’s eyes lit up.

Those tabi were on the very first model Margiela sent out in his debut show in 1988. She walked through the Café de la Gare in Paris at 4:40 PM with ribbons on her cuffs, tabi on her feet, and no shirt on. Other models followed down the makeshift runway in flesh-colored mesh with tattoo illustrations in reference to French Polynesian artwork and chiffon veils paired with bright red toenails, some of them wearing no shoes at all. Margiela used the body as another fabric to play with and made absence as effective a design choice as the excess displayed by the dominant labels of that era. The finale culminated in what has since become legend: the models emerged in white lab coats identical to those Margiela’s team wore, with their shoes dipped in red paint, leaving strange, red markings on the runway—not quite footprints, not quite hoofprints. In one of his rare interviews on the subject—for an exhibition at Antwerp’s MoMu co-curated by Bruloot called “Foot Print: The Tracks of Shoes in Fashion”—Margiela explains this theatrical decision like so: "I thought the audience should notice the new footwear. And what would be more evident than its footprint?”

Margiela introduced the fashion industry to the uncanny valley in his debut. Though the uncanny valley repulsion response is usually in reference to robotics that look just a little too much like humans, Margiela induced it with a comparatively low-tech pair of shoes. Tabi look similar enough to classic boots to not be the first thing you see in an outfit, but upon closer inspection, they become the main object of fascination and demand your judgement. The colorways contribute to the confusion: a beige leather pair might look so much like fleshy, cloven hooves that they repulse you, to say nothing of the alienation you might experience—and eventually come to love—from seeing a high-shine metallic or a patterned one.

Margiela would take that tabi-painted runway and re-use it for his next show—he turned it into a waistcoat held together by brown scotch tape. This was as much a budgetary decision as a design ethos: make the familiar strange again and the strange beautiful; making the most of what you’ve got and turning it into something new. Margiela’s delight in inventive thriftiness is a big part of what made the brand so thrilling when it debuted. He explained to Bruloot that, "In the beginning there was no budget for a new form. So I had no other choice than to continue with [the tabi style] if I wanted shoes. [But] after several collections people started asking for them. And they wanted more… And they didn’t stop asking, thank God!”

- via Ssense, words by Arabelle Sicardi