Alexander Skarsgård turned up to the BFI London Film Festival premiere of ‘Wicker’ on 8 October wearing a pair of see-through shoes, and the internet has not recovered. The PVC oxfords, designed by Saint Laurent under creative director Anthony Vaccarello, dominated UK search interest within hours, with ‘alexander skarsgard’ spiking hard on Google Trends over the weekend.
It is the kind of image built for a slow news Saturday: a six-foot-four Swedish actor, a horror premiere, and shoes you can see his bare feet through. But before anyone declares transparent footwear the next big menswear idea, it is worth asking a less glamorous question, is this actually a trend, or just one actor repeatedly wearing one designer’s party trick?
What Alexander Skarsgård actually wore on the Wicker carpet
The shoes in question are Saint Laurent’s ‘O.Fan’ PVC oxfords, part of the house’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear collection and designed under freelance shoe director Corrado De Biase. Skarsgård wore them with a tailored suit for the ‘Wicker’ premiere, pairing fully transparent soles and uppers with an otherwise conventional red-carpet look.
The contrast is the point. A classic oxford silhouette rendered in see-through plastic reads as deliberate provocation, not accident, the kind of styling choice designed to generate exactly the reaction it got. Within a day, the image had been clipped, reposted and dissected across fashion commentary accounts.
The reaction split neatly into two camps: people fascinated by the audacity, and people asking the obvious practical question, what happens to transparent shoes after an hour of standing on a red carpet in October. That tension between spectacle and wearability is where this story actually gets interesting.
From BDSM boots to PVC oxfords: a house habit, not a movement
This is not Skarsgård’s first appearance in Saint Laurent footwear built to shock. At Cannes in 2025, he wore the house’s BDSM boots from its Fall/Winter 2025 menswear collection, thigh-high, heavily buckled, unmistakably referencing fetish dress codes. Saint Laurent had already run the same idea through its womenswear with a transparent stiletto, so the O.Fan oxford is really the fourth stop on one continuous design lineage, not a new departure.
Put plainly: this looks far less like a menswear trend than a recurring Saint Laurent signature, built around Vaccarello’s taste for pushing eroticism onto the runway and, increasingly, onto one specific red carpet. WWD and CNN’s own coverage has framed these pieces as a house ‘tradition’, their word, not a prediction of where the wider industry is heading. Vaccarello has described the aesthetic directly, calling the look ‘classy and kinky,’ a line that doubles as a mission statement for the whole run of boots and oxfords.
Crucially, nobody else on the SS27 menswear calendar sent anything comparable down the runway, and no other house has dressed a client in see-through footwear this season. A real trend moves sideways across brands and wardrobes. This one has moved, so far, between one designer’s studio and one actor’s feet, which is a pattern, but not yet a movement.
Why sheer footwear fails the test that sockless style passed
There’s a useful comparison sitting in recent menswear history. The sockless, bare-ankle look that spread through tailoring in the 2010s succeeded because it demanded nothing special, no new material, no fragile construction, just an existing trouser and loafer worn slightly differently. It was a trend precisely because any man could copy it on a Tuesday.
Transparent PVC oxfords fail that test immediately. The practicality jokes that followed Skarsgård’s appearance, about sweaty feet on display, about how these shoes would actually survive a normal day, aren’t just online noise, they’re pointing at the real structural problem. Clothing people actually adopt has to survive contact with an ordinary life, and see-through shoes, by design, don’t try to.
That’s also what connects this moment to Robert Mapplethorpe’s fetish photography, a reference Dazed and WWD have both drawn in covering the look. Mapplethorpe’s images were never meant to be lived in either, they were composed to be looked at. Vaccarello’s shoes sit in the same tradition: runway-as-provocation dressing, engineered for a press cycle and a photograph rather than a wardrobe. De Biase has spoken about designing against men’s instinctive discomfort showing their bare feet in public, which only underlines how pointed the gesture is, this was never built to be comfortable, it was built to be noticed.
So file this one correctly: a striking, well-executed stunt from a designer with a known taste for kink-adjacent spectacle, worn by an actor who clearly doesn’t mind being his muse for it. Whether retailers see any real demand for transparent menswear beyond this one red carpet is the question worth watching next.
Photo: FiesolanaNYC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, modified: subject cutout on an editorial collage background; montage licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
