The $995 Shoe
In 1988 Martin Margiela showed a shoe with a split toe.
The fashion press did not know what to make of it. It looked like a mistake. It looked like a foot. It looked like nothing anyone had seen on a runway before, which was precisely the point. The split between the big toe and the rest of the foot referenced the tabi, a traditional Japanese sock worn by workers and geisha alike for centuries. Margiela took something functional, something humble, something designed for people who worked with their hands and feet, and put it on a runway in Paris.
He priced it accordingly.
The Maison Margiela Tabi has not been discontinued since that first showing. It has been reissued, recoloured, reimagined in leather, suede, patent, canvas. It has been worn by people who understand exactly what they are wearing and people who have no idea. It has been copied by brands that cannot afford to admit they are copying it and ignored by brands that consider themselves above influence. It currently retails at $995.
That price is not arbitrary. It reflects the construction, the materials, the hand-finishing, the lasting process that gives the split its clean line. But it also reflects something harder to measure. The cost of an idea that took thirty years to become obvious.
The Tabi is worth understanding not because it is expensive but because it is correct. It solves a problem nobody had admitted was a problem. The conventional shoe forces the foot into a single silhouette. The Tabi lets the foot be a foot. The split looks strange until it looks like the only logical conclusion.
What Maison Margiela built with the Tabi is not a shoe. It is an argument. The argument is that clothing and objects should serve the body and the person rather than the other way around. That the idea behind the object matters more than the material. That a $995 price tag and a tabi sock from a Kyoto workshop in the seventeenth century are separated by nothing more than context.
The Maison Margiela Tabi is a split-toe leather shoe first designed by Martin Margiela in 1988, inspired by the traditional Japanese tabi sock. It has been in continuous production since its debut and currently retails at $995. It is considered one of the most influential and enduring shoe designs in contemporary fashion history.
Most things at $995 ask you to believe they are worth $995. The Tabi asks a different question entirely.
It asks whether you have been paying attention.
~ 9.95
