Name: Bare feet.
Age: The oldest shoes ever found are estimated to be about 9,000 years old, so older than that. Bare feet have been around since there have been people with feet – or since Adam and Eve.
Why are we talking about them now? I thought Pass Notes was about breaking news, not ancient history. Because they are back.
Pass Notes? No, that never went away … well, it did, but that’s another story. Bare feet!
Where? In Los Angeles. Ergo, in fashion.
Says who? Says the fashion site the Cut. It has declared that “2023 will be Barefoot-Boy Summer™”.
Bold statement. And does it have the evidence to back it up? Jacob Elordi was spotted on a coffee run “sans chaussures”.
The very tall Australian actor? His feet are so far away he probably didn’t even notice … And musician Mike Sabath was also seen shoeless.
Mike Sabath? Of Mike Sabath and the Moongirls.
Of course. Plus, when the Italian label Etro launched its spring 23 collection, it sent its male models down the runway a piedi nudi. And speaking of runways and bare feet, in a recent episode of Succession – spoiler alert! – Swedish tech mogul Lukas Matsson makes the journey from his PJ to Shiv’s PJ barfota …
Surely no one wears shoes with PJs? You will find that, in modern parlance, PJs refers not to nightwear but to how billionaires get about.
Private jets, got it. And if it’s in Succession, it must be a thing. Is it just the men, though? No, as ever, women are leading the way. At Cannes this year, Cate Blanchett took to the stage wearing nothing on her feet, to show solidarity with women in Iran.
It is a Cannes thing, no? Yes. In 2018, Kristen Stewart kicked off her Christian Louboutins to climb the red-carpeted steps. As did Julia Roberts and Sasha Lane a couple of years before.
Also Zola Budd. Oh yes, the South African middle- and long-distance runner, in the 80s. Way ahead of the field. Or behind it.
How so? Obviously, no one wore shoes in the 60s either. And the Cut says the current Barefoot-Boy Summer™ aligns with the “ongoing bohemian-hippy vibe coursing through the culture”.
Man. OK, I’m on board: lose the shoes. Just one problem. Yes?
It is all very well on Hollywood’s polished sidewalks and the red carpets of Cannes, but around my way it is all broken glass and dog poo, and I don’t want that between my toes. No, I can appreciate that. A pair of stilts then, perhaps? Which you can operate barefoot, though it might be a bit painful. On the flipside, you get to feel what it’s like to be as tall as Elordi.
Do say: “Adios, Balenciaga! Boo-hoo Jimmy Choo!”
Don’t say: “Eurgh, verruca!”
