Yesterday morning, amid scattered showers, fashion gathered in a brightly lit 7th-floor space just steps from Madison Square Garden for Area’s spring collection. It was Nicholas Aburn’s third showing for the collection, equal parts hedonistic party and childlike wonder. Beneath the strips of sequin material and ink-blotted jeans, something equally just as interesting adorned the models’ feet in the form of minuscule laced heels reminiscent of ped socks. Meet the designer, Evelina: the 23-year-old fashion graduate from Polimoda.
“The Barely There heels were born as a part of my graduate collection, which was inspired by Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and self-portraits of Pierre Molinier, exploring the idea of conservative ambiguity,” Evelina explains via DM after the show. (Unfortunately, her visa didn’t come in time and she was unable to attend.) Interestingly, the silhouette was her first time working in footwear. “I constructed the shoe entirely from scratch, developing its shape from the anatomy of my own feet. Socks and tights were recurring materials throughout the collection, so I wanted to push that idea further and create something that played with what’s seen and what’s hidden.”
From the moodboard to the runway.
Photo: Evelina
Aburn originally stumbled across Evelina’s work on Instagram, where he reached out to include her as part of the show. She worked to refine and lightly tweak the graduate collection version in an organic collaboration. “I saw Evelina’s work, and it was super inspiring to me,” Auburn tells Vogue. “They’re very pretty and delicate, and I think with the collection it felt very emotionally connected, where it had this kind of simplicity of walking around the house in your little socks. The lightness felt very native to that innocence I was thinking about with the collection.”
Lately, there’s been plenty of freaky close-to-the-ground shoes to go around—maybe too many—but there’s something about these clinging peds that scratch an almost surrealist itch. “I was interested in making something that felt familiar at first, but became slightly unsettling the longer you looked at it,” Evelina says. Part ballet, part lingerie, it’s perfectly subverted, and now available for purchase. Her biggest takeaway from the launch of the Barely There shoe? “I realized that so many people are actually ashamed of their feet. Guys, free your toes.”
Backstage at Area’s spring 2027 runway show.
Photo: Area
