Tabi Boot

The Tabi boot was the first thing anyone noticed at Martin Margiela’s Spring/Summer 1989 debut. Before the deconstructed garments, before the red-painted runway, before the children watching from the playground swings — the boots. Based on the Japanese tabi sock, a traditional split-toed garment worn with thonged sandals, Margiela’s version rendered the form in leather and set it on a cylindrical wooden heel. The toe was divided like a cloven hoof, and as the models walked across the wet red paint of the runway, they left bifurcated prints — an image that was simultaneously playful and deeply unsettling, as if the models were not quite human.

The provocation was deliberate and multilayered. In 1988, Parisian footwear was governed by the stiletto and the pump — shoes designed to elongate the leg, to suggest elegance, to perform femininity according to established codes. The Tabi did none of these things. It made the foot look strange. It referenced a Japanese working-class garment — functional, humble, historically invisible to Western fashion. And it divided the foot into two distinct sections, insisting on the anatomical reality of toes at a moment when fashion preferred to treat the foot as a smooth, undifferentiated surface. The wooden heel clicked on the floor with a sound that didn’t belong in a fashion show. Everything about it was wrong, which is to say, everything about it was right.

The Tabi has remained in continuous production at Maison Margiela since 1989, evolving through countless variations — ankle boots, knee-highs, ballet flats, sneakers — while maintaining the essential split-toe form. It is the house’s most recognizable piece, its commercial backbone, and its purest statement of intent. More than three decades after its debut, the Tabi retains its capacity to make the familiar strange — which is, in the end, the only thing Margiela ever asked a garment to do.