Can all of the celebrities please put their shoes back on?

Who let the dogs out?

Who let the dogs out?

Who let the dogs out? Celebrities have! It all seemingly started when an image of Brisbane native, Jacob Elordi, surfaced from a few years ago. The man was bravely hitting the LA pavements shoeless, making skin contact with the city streets, causing his fanbase to spiral into a fervent, foot-fuelled craze. It was irksome at worst, considering it is my firm belief that if you are wandering around a town big enough to have traffic lights, you should be protecting the trotters, but given Elordi’s whole vibe is “down to earth Aussie bloke” it didn’t seem that out of character.

Then came the rest. Shawn Mendes was spotted with a member of his possé, Mike Sabath, who was shoeless, as they all picked up smoothies; Kanye West and his new wife Bianca Censori have been out and about on multiple occasions in nary but sheer stockings to protect themselves from the Hollywood streets, and then again in Italy recently with not a shoe in sight. Chris Pine was witnessed ambling around Milan barefoot on his way to the Zegna spring 2024 show; Even Alexander Skarsgaard hopped off his private jet in a recent episode of Succession and walked across the tarmac barefoot. It begs the question: why are all of these wealthy people risking tetanus and trench foot for the sake of shoelessness? Why has it become so pervasive that I am writing 500 words on the topic?

 

 

 

 

 

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It feels as though celebrities are flaunting the kind of comfort that only the ultra wealthy could feel sauntering around the place with their dogs out. Nobody is going to assume you’re going to cause trouble when you’re a 6”4 white man with a Bottega Veneta Cassette bag slung across your torso as you slide out of your Range Rover, which is what is also kind of weird about the whole thing: are celebrities so unaware of barefoot repercussions that they simply don’t care about their feet being judged by the public? Have they no humility??

Logistically speaking, navigating city streets barefoot is a personal idea of hell for me, which makes it all the more confusing why those who are mostly unaffected by things like the cost of living crisis and the woes of capitalism are opting out of shoes. Perhaps that’s the point? From a cultural perspective it is largely NBD and one could chalk it up to celebrity inner-circles suddenly becoming obsessed with the prospect of “earthing”– in which case, go off, just maybe do it on your lawn instead of Rodeo Drive?

Naturally there are moments where this should be allowed, and they almost exclusively fall in the category of Cate Blanchett going barefoot at Cannes Film Festival “in honour of the women of Iran,” but for the most part, let’s leave “barefoot boy summer” in the barely existent realm that it belongs, for the sake of all of us, and for the sake of ringworm.

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Originally published as Can all of the celebrities please put their shoes back on?