The return of the foot fetish

Last week, the 31-year-old actress Margaret Qualley showed up to the London premiere of her newest film, The Dog Stars, wearing a “barefoot heel cap sandal” from Chanel — a quarter-shoe that has a rumored, up-to $2,700 price tag and is merely a small heel strapped to the instep. The rest of the wearer’s foot, including much of the sole and the toes, touches the ground, unsheathed. “Barefoot” shoes may well be catching on as a trend at the moment, with Jeffrey Campbell’s “A-Pieds,” priced at a more reasonable $50 a pair. The style has obvious provocative and attention-getting qualities, but it’s more noteworthy as a wink and a nod to the huge cultural resurgence of the foot fetish, especially among Gen Z. 

This phenomenon is appearing in all kinds of non-porn and porn-adjacent content. Quentin Tarantino, for example, was an early adopter, starting with his magnum opus Pulp Fiction in 1994, and has stuck with the preoccupation throughout his career. He featured Qualley’s own bare feet prominently in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. On Instagram, risquĂŠ but not pornographic OnlyFans models striking poses involving their feet will periodically appear on my feed — often multiple times throughout the day. Zoomers tend to be shy of sex conversations, but with clues here and there — feet jokes, the feet-featuring reels I’m sent, side comments that fixate on women’s footwear — it’s clear to me that it’s an interest among my cohort. 

The best statistics, however, come from foot-porn numbers, available from PornHub, and concern material showing actual naked people in a video. According to the porn aggregator’s 2025 report, the “feet” category gained a 69% (don’t laugh) increase in views over the course of the year. More to the point, Gen Z viewers’ searches for “feet” were 347% more frequent than searches by other generations. The only category that Gen Z seemed to like more, compared with older generations, was “party,” at +385%. As Pornhub sadly put it, this was a manifestation of “the need for connection” sought by Zoomers. 

The 24-year-old Julia Filippo, among the most viral in the ever-expanding cadre of Miami OnlyFans girls, plays to the interest. Scroll her Instagram, and you’ll see her sucking on a long, phallic lollipop with her leg bent over behind her head, and four individual, smaller lollipops placed between her white-pedicured toes. In another post, captioned “glizzy time,” she’s in a bathtub filled with hot dogs: in one photo, her leg is bent up as she stares at the hot dog she’s placed between her toes; in three others, in slightly different poses, she’s pointing her toes, which are holding a mayonnaise-globbed hot dog, at the camera. Hungry yet? In still another, Filippo performs a sexualized version of the king pigeon yoga pose, staring at her foot with her tongue out, as if she’s ready to lick it. 

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Filippo has 1.2 million followers on her main Instagram account and 292,000 on her secondary one. Meanwhile, there’s also wikiFeet, where you can browse and rate celebrity feet. While men are included, it’s the women the website boosts and who get by far the most attention. FeetFinder, a platform that allows one to anonymously sell feet pics online, estimates that its “established creators” make between $2,000 and over $5,000 a month — just for pictures of their feet. 

In the outright porn category, adult superstars like Riley Reid have embraced foot fetishism, too, and wholly departed from hardcore content creation. Reid posted on X on Jan. 14, “did someone say feet content?” holding her open-toe heels up to a mirror, and on Mar. 18, “these feet got dance moves” to a video of her moving her feet around and wiggling her toes.

Graphic foot-porn tends to be some combination of the female performer enthusing about how “sexy” or “cute” or “little” or “smelly” her feet are (depending on the foot-proclivity in question), followed by her (or her co-star) maybe enthusiastically removing her heels or sneakers or sandals or pantyhose, maybe some toe-sucking (by her male counterpart, and sometimes, herself sucking her own toes), then maybe a footjob (like a handjob, but with feet), and ‌ you can imagine the rest. There’s also fully solo feet-play, and lesbian feet play, involving genital stimulation, mutual foot-licking, foot-deepthroating, and other such goodies. Sometimes the actress’s feet will be well-kept and, dare I say, pretty; other times, they’ll be dirty, which is probably the point for some viewers. Still rarer, but definitely out there, is the inverse dynamic: a female porn actress sucking on a man’s toes. 

This odd new interest demands the question, why now? The foot fetish is one of the oldest recognized fetishes, and has long been an emblem of deviant sexuality, but during the great kink mainstreaming that took place in the era of Tumblr and the sex apps, it wasn’t particularly prevalent. An informal poll of Boomer and Gen X kinksters, including Melanie (her name has been changed), a 58-year-old woman who frequently uses the Kinkster platform to solicit BDSM encounters, turned up no one who’d ever encountered the interest in the wild. Melanie said she has been involved in the kink scene throughout her adult life and has met dozens of men through it, including of younger generations such as Millennials, and that she’s never come across foot fetishism.

Zoomers, however, were raised on porn, and no one can avoid it online anymore. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, who is a practicing Muslim, has a hijabi wife, and is 41 years old, has openly said: “every third video that scrolls on its own, is gonna be some OnlyFans model.” And the algorithm likely plays its part in encouraging the fetish. Filippo, for instance, is clothed on Instagram, even if scantily so, which meets Meta’s anti-porn threshold. Instagram seems to optimize such pornographic-but-not-officially-porn content. OnlyFans promotions on X, which have the option of showing graphic content, also seem to skew towards feet pics — leading one to suspect that such material gets the most clicks. The promotion by the platforms must, to some extent, create even more demand.

But in a more human sense, perhaps because Zoomers are overexposed to graphic porn content, eroticism has moved elsewhere, to content that is more interesting because it’s traditionally less explicit. The foot fetish is also alluring because it still has an aura of weirdness and taboo, so it can still shock in a porn-universe where little is shocking. What is more, in an increasingly sex-averse world, it substitutes as an object of desire. 

There’s traditional sex appeal to some of it — Filippo is conventionally attractive, showing a lot of skin, whatever — but it isn’t the point. Nor is the appeal sexual humiliation, in the old-fashioned sense. The Zoomer interest is of a different variety than, say, the 59-year-old, Leftist independent journalist Glenn Greenwald’s leaked tape from spring of last year, in which he paid to suck on a Brazilian male prostitute’s toes. Greenwald wore a schoolgirl skirt throughout the affair and showed the man that he’d sent him $2,000 by PayPal after he was done, to top off the humiliation ritual. 

To the straight Zoomer man, a woman’s foot is a location upon which to channel desire; he doesn’t want to experience pain or degradation or anything like that per se. The foot-as-object is the point, not submission. The foot provides very little sexually, in comparison to other body parts, and thus feels safer, and is even more appealing to a sex-avoidant generation. Will Gluck, the director of the new romantic-comedy One Night Only, said that he avoided significant nudity and sex-heavy scenes specifically because younger movie-goers are made uncomfortable by them. I, for one, am 19 years old, and I remember that in middle school, one of my more annoying friends stole my phone from me and proceeded to follow multiple foot fetish accounts on Instagram — I probably spent hours thereafter unfollowing all these accounts. That, at least, was my introduction to all this.  

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And there may be something to the foot itself. Women take better care of their feet than men and wear nicer shoes, but then why wouldn’t a man have the urge to masturbate to a woman’s manicured hand, too, or fixate on it during sex? Freud recognized the foot as an object of particular sexual fixation, speculating that it was a “phallic substitute,” for when a child recognized that his mother did not have a penis. 

There’s also a sense of return to a pre-Sexual Revolution sexuality. Overstimulated by porn and scared by actual sex — and by many accounts having worse and more awkward sex at that — Zoomers long for re-mystification. 

The last really major era for the foot fetish, by contemporary standards, might have been the 1950s, with a defining artifact of the moment Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, featuring the late Brigitte Bardot. For Vadim, the actress’s feet were a topic of fixation in a way that immediately recalls 2026. Bardot plays a young orphan girl who’s been placed with a family — in Saint-Tropez, no less — where she navigates relationships with men from opposing ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. In the opening scene, the camera zooms in on Bardot’s feet as she’s sunbathing. In another, she’s scolded for walking around barefoot in the shop she works at, as if this alone made her a slut. She also bikes barefoot and walks throughout the town barefoot. All throughout the film, there are numerous close-ups of her feet. The film would come to define the wild and playful “Bardot aesthetic” and also was seen as shattering the sexual mores of the ’50s. That feet had the ability to do this is a tribute to their sexual power. 

Of course, what followed during and after the Sexual Revolution was actual sex — more of it in film; more of it in the real world; more of it pre-marital. Zoomers aren’t doing as much of that, but their foot fetishism demonstrates that sexuality, in some form, will always be present. When Zoomers do have sex, it’s also often different — many need to have sex as if they’re imagining themselves in a porno, wherein fixations on objects of desire such as feet would come in. Unlike Tarantino, who operates in a sex-and-kink-celebrating world, Vadim was not necessarily thought of as a foot fetishist. Feet were understood as an expression of sexuality, even if somewhat scandalous. What else is Gen Z’s foot fetish, if not just that? Chanel is just being honest about it — and making a great profit on a mere fraction of a shoe, as well.