Is There Such a Thing as a Fake Tabi?
- Soraya Odubeko
- Nov 14, 2025
- 7 min read
Our collective reverence of Margiela’s tabi both erases the style’s Japanese origins and contravenes the original ethos of a maison that treated the commodity as an object of suspicion.
Looming large over the tabi’s entrance into popular culture is one rather reclusive Belgian designer. Martin Margiela’s version of the split-toe has come to stand for the style at large, in spite of its Japanese roots. As Female Menace writes, the conversation around the tabi is firmly centered on Maison Margiela; instead of asking Where are your tabis from?, the question is more likely to be Are those real or fake Margiela tabis?
This happens as fashion continues to contend with the afterlives of Western cultural imperialism. The refashioning of the South Asian dupatta as the "Scandinavian scarf" by certain trend-addled quadrants of the internet prompted discussions about British colonialism in India. A similar reckoning took place with the Afghan coat, whose origins in the Ghazni region of Afghanistan were momentarily usurped by the stylish proto-stan Penny Lane, portrayed on-screen by Kate Hudson in Almost Famous (2000). In the fashion industry, exoticism and erasure occur simultaneously. Items are made attractive by their difference or foreignness — that slight indication that they come from somewhere else. This doesn’t guarantee that their creators will be properly credited.
There has been a similar resistance to the appropriation of the tabi. Female Menace writes on Substack that the uptake of the split-toe amongst the trendy residents of Western capitals is accompanied by a fundamental ignorance of the Japanese history of the style. Once intended to keep samurais' feet planted firmly on the ground, the tabi has been transformed into an elitist signifier of cultural capital, distinguishing those who’ve been privileged with taste and money (a pair of tabi flats will set you back over £800 in 2025).
The transformation of the Margiela tabi into a tool of conspicuous consumption is regarded as an odd reversal of Martin Margiela’s ‘anti-fashion’ approach. Margiela, the man, represents the iconoclasm of the '90s. He staged runways in the Parisian banlieues, where fashion press were not treated with the usual deference but made to stand or — heaven forbid — sit in the second row. He complicated the traditional repertoire of haute couture techniques, eschewing even a label in favour of four single, looped stitches. Like his clothing, his public image defied the glossy sheen of celebrity — to this day, we only have a handful of photographs of him.
Margiela’s FW02 runway show had models dressed up in white lab coats, holding transparent plexiglass boxes with vintage handbags encased. Kaat Debo, curator and director of MoMu in Antwerp, describes this spectacle as a specifically Margelian critique of commodity fetishism. Similarly, Debo reads Margiela’s artisanal collections as a Marxist critique. (It was not unlike Margiela to observe capitalist relations and respond to them in his art. He designed his first tabi after a trip to Japan in the 1980s, during which he noticed split-toe shoes on the feet of factory workers.)
Dupe culture certainly resembles fetish, embodying in new ways those "metaphysical subtleties and theological quirks" of the commodity that Marx once puzzled over. Editor Alexandra Hildreth writes that with dupe culture, "the stigma of trying and failing dissipates". This is as true for designer fashion as it is for overpriced water bottles. Once upon a time, wearing a fake was a fashion faux pas that one would only admit to under the most pressing circumstances. (Think Samantha Jones's mortification — while admitting to Hugh Hefner — that she was carrying a fake Fendi baguette in season 3 of Sex and the City). Now, as living costs skyrocket and luxury brands continue to hike prices, new consumption patterns challenge hierarchies of taste. Amazon storefronts and TikTok shopping are abounding with replicas, which are not just tolerated but frequently celebrated as the democratisation of high fashion. Participation in dupe culture has become the mark of a savvy, discerning consumer.
From amongst the Bottega Jodies and Goyard totes, the Margiela tabi has emerged as one of dupe culture’s darlings. (In a culture so averse to feet, the rise of toe-forward footwear has been something to behold.) Margiela dupes are now widely available, most notably from the veteran Woodchuck Sato and, infamously, AliExpress. But unlike other it-items, dupes of the Margiela tabi are defended for more than just their economic accessibility. Dupe culture has been put forward as a tool to recentre the Japanese origins of the tabi and prevent further instances of Western appropriation.
The crux of this argument is that it is not possible to dupe the Margiela tabi, because it is a Japanese style that never belonged to Martin Margiela in the first place. From this perspective, the Margiela tabi is already the dupe, and any attempt to replicate it is a morally neutral, if not positive, anti-monopolistic undertaking that Margiela himself would have approved of. This line of thinking proposes that by removing the split-toe from the domain of Margiela and reintroducing it to the world on its own terms, we can destabilise the monopoly of one brand and the hierarchy of high fashion that underpins it.
This claim makes sense in our current political culture. Ownership is a fraught thing, being so bound up with the uneven cultural exchanges that have directed life on Earth since European expansionism began in the 15th century. As minority groups across the West — and in much of the global South — fight to make political claims, the desire to underscore the rightful ownership of cultural objects is an important political impulse.
But it is not clear that participating in dupe culture actually addresses the cultural grievances that surround the split-toe. The suggestion that the Margiela tabi cannot be duped because it is itself a dupe certainly does not account for the dynamic processes of cultural exchange that are at play in its design. When we treat the Margiela tabi as an expropriated item that belongs solely to Japan, we lose sight of the cultural complexity that drives fashion and other art forms. As new nationalisms informed by ideas of cultural purity spring up all around us, why deny the deeply human tendency to mix?
The tabi was born as a sock worn with sandals (Geta) by Japanese elites in the 15th century. Later, in the 17th century, the introduction of trade with China allowed commoners to take up the split-toe style, albeit in limited colours and fabrics. In a later innovation, the tabi sock was attached to a rubber sole and became the Jika-Tabi, worn by construction and factory workers. These shifts in political economy shaped the development of the tabi and delivered it to new audiences domestically. Some time later, the shrinking of the world created an international audience for the tabi, and the shoe was once again reinterpreted by Martin Margiela in the 1980s. His interpretation was not a straightforward facsimile of its Japanese predecessor.
In their designs, Martin Margiela and his successors have married the split-toe to various other styles of shoe, some of which have contested origins. Norway, the USA, and England all vie for ownership of the loafer. The ballet flat began its ascent to the pinnacle of French-girl chic in the Renaissance-era royal courts. Mary-Janes were popularised in the United States, their namesake being a character in Richard Felton Outcault’s Buster Brown comic series. When these Western canonical styles were combined with the Japanese split-toe, they became something of a novelty: an "East-meets-West" fashion intervention, deliciously characteristic of our globalising world. This process of hybridisation is not unfamiliar to any of us; virtually every aspect of culture in the Americas has been born out of the mixing of different traditions. No matter how much one sitting president would like it to be true, we are not siloed into individual nations, producing for ourselves by ourselves, using only the natural materials that occur in the territory between our borders.
Martin Margiela was open to witnessing and ushering in these moments of synergy. He was fundamentally anti-purity, dedicated to refitting and transforming existing collections through techniques like décortiqué and assemblage that we continued to associate with the house under Galliano and Glenn Martens. In the exhibition notes for"‘Maison Martin Margiela 20," Kaat Debo writes that Martin Margiela’s garments “do not hide the course of time, but carry along the traces of a garment’s previous life and incorporate it into the new item – they are the silent witnesses of durée.” In the design of the Margiela tabi, we see multiple different lives and multiple different cultural traditions interacting together with the Japanese split-toe at their helm. The shoe itself is a testament to the durée of global fashion history. The question then becomes how we account for both the very real erasure of the tabi’s Japanese roots and the inherent hybridity of Margiela’s design.
Dupe culture may not be the correct vehicle for inviting in this complexity. Overzealous endorsement of Margiela dupes may risk eclipsing the tabi’s Japanese origins entirely. The tabi dupes in question are quite clearly replicas of the various interpretations of the tabi designed by Margiela, not the original Jika-Tabi boot. They feature that '70s-style cylindrical heel and, up until recently, Woodchuck Sato’s shoe included the single-stitch logo that Maison Margiela is known for. Another observation of Hildreth’s rings true here: there is a fine line between a dupe and a counterfeit. Placing Margiela’s specific design front and centre to be replicated ad infinitum narrows our imaginations as to what the tabi is, has been, and can be; it only strengthens the brand’s monopoly. If authenticity is important, it is because it invites us to learn about the historical and creative foundations of our garments. 🌀
Soraya Odubeko is a writer from London whose work explores the intersection of identity and the arts. Her words have appeared in publications like DAZED, Schön! , and TANK. Follow her on Instagram @sorayaodubeko.