The first thing Martin Margiela's audience saw of the Tabi boot was not the boot. It was the trail it left behind. At his debut show in the autumn of 1988, presenting the spring/summer 1989 collection in a shabby café-theatre called the Café de la Gare, the models walked over a length of white cotton with their soles dipped in red paint. By the end of the show the floor carried two rows of small cloven prints, each one split down the middle where a normal shoe has no business splitting. Margiela explained the staging plainly afterwards: he wanted people to notice the footwear, and nothing announces a shoe like its footprint.

The shape was not his invention, and he never pretended it was. The tabi is a Japanese sock with a gap between the big toe and the rest, made to fit the thong of a geta or zori sandal, and it goes back centuries. By the twentieth century the same split had migrated into the jika-tabi, the rubber-soled work boot still worn by Japanese builders and farmers. Margiela had come back from a trip to Japan and put the divided toe into black leather, set it on a small cylindrical heel, and ran the lacing up the inside of the ankle. The clever part was the heel, which made the foot look bare, as if the wearer were balanced on a hidden block rather than wearing a shoe at all.

Getting it made was its own problem. The split toe was radical enough that the usual cobblers turned the job down. A friend of the house, the Antwerp retailer Geert Bruloot, eventually brought the prototype to an Italian craftsman named Zagato, who had spent his best years making shoes for the designer Tokio Kumagai and had half-retired after Kumagai died. Bruloot showed him the boot over dinner and he agreed on the spot. There is something fitting about a shoe this strange depending on one semi-retired specialist willing to take it seriously.

The press did not know what to do with it. The reviews reached for animals: goat shoes, hooves, the cloven feet of the devil. One Vogue writer remembered a colleague saying the sight of the things made her feel ill. That reaction never fully went away. Decades later, when an actor wore Tabis to an awards show, the internet had the same small panic about feet that fork. And yet the boots sold immediately, which is the part the squeamish reviews tended to skip. The discomfort was the appeal.

Margiela built the whole house on a refusal to perform, and the Tabi belongs to that programme. He and his partner Jenny Meirens sewed a blank white label into the clothes, held on by four loose stitches you could cut out, so the garment carried no name at all. He didn't take bows. He gave almost no interviews and answered the few he couldn't avoid by fax, always in the plural, as if the house were a committee rather than a man. He arrived as part of a wider turn against fashion's gloss, the same quiet, anti-spectacle current that would later carry the Helmut Lang years out of Vienna. The boot is a signature that declines to behave like one. You know it from the footprint, never from a logo.

Margiela left the label that carries his name around 2009, John Galliano has run it since 2014, and the boot has outlasted both transitions. It has turned up in some form in every collection since 1989, remade as clogs, sandals, flats, even ice skates. Margiela once called it the most important footprint of his career, recognisable, still going after twenty-five years, and never copied. The last claim is the one that stays with me. Houses borrow each other's shapes within a season as a matter of routine. Nobody has dared lift the split toe, partly because it is too recognisable to steal, and partly, I think, because most designers still find it faintly repellent. The thing that should have killed it commercially is the exact thing that kept it alive.

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