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After years of bulbous footwear dominating the runway, the pointy shoe is making a comeback. For Gucci’s SS24 show, creative director Sabato De Sarno paired front-slit pencil skirts and low-rise jeans with pointed-toe slingbacks in bubblegum pink and oxblood. At Saint Laurent, vampy stilettos peeked out from under safari jumpsuits, while Dries Van Noten styled checkered tapered-toe heels with graphic tube socks and preppy blazers.
“The pointy shoe trend has definitely brought back some elegance,” says London designer Nensi Dojaka, whose tulle pumps (£960, ssense.com) combines a sharp tip with its characteristic cuts. Luisa Dames, founder of the Berlin footwear and accessories brand Aeyde, has also seen a significant rise in sales of its pointed-toe styles (from £270) in recent months, noting that their “polished” appeal is in line with the current appetite for dressier shoes. “We’re seeing a return to the joy of dressing up,” says Dames, “and pointed shoes, whether stiletto boots, pumps, or Mary Jane flats, adapt easily from casual to formal settings.”
These shoes have long been a symbol of opulence: see Marie Antoinette, who paraded around Versailles in flirty pointy-striped slippers, or Marilyn Monroe, who wore Ferragamo’s four-inch Filetia and Viatica pumps both on and off set. . “Shoes were a way of expressing status and wealth; the wearer had no need to walk everywhere and could therefore take on impractical forms,” explains Helen Persson Swain, fashion historian and curator of Shoes: pleasure and pain at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The trend, he says, has been around since the ancient Egyptians, who wore sandals made of papyrus with chiseled pointed toes.
At its most impractical, during the fashion for poulaines among nobles in the late Middle Ages, toes were even known to reach lengths of up to 24 inches, stuffed with moss or wool to keep them upright. Women of the 17th and 18th centuries, with their long skirts, had only the pointed toes of their shoes visible, Swain says, “giving the impression of small feet, which were considered clean and feminine.”
Although the fashion for crinolines has long since faded, our desire to pinch and squeeze our toes into infinitesimal points seems unabated: see Martine Rose’s AW24 show for her own poulaine-style pointed toe flats (£640). “I’m a big fan of pointed shoes,” says Sandra Choi, creative director of Jimmy Choo, offering glamorous pointy heels embellished with pearls and crystals (from £750). “For a 5ft 2½in person, they lengthen your leg and make you feel taller.” In addition to adding sparkle to an ensemble, a tapered toe screams “assertiveness,” saying, “It almost launches you forward.”