Dance Finger

A pair of Vibram Five Fingers

I've been considering getting myself a pair of Vibram Five Fingers, but I've worried about sticking out like, well, a sore toe. But I should have known that the toe-conforming sport footwear were but the advance guard of a new trend—call it "enhanced nudity" or maybe "nudity 2.0″—and would soon seem old-fashioned. The product to define the new cutting edge of enhanced nudity hasn't arrived yet, but it's visible in Footstickers, which Dutch designer Frieke Sievers created as a graduation project for a Nike-sponsored product design program.

Sievers envisions her fictional footwear in three styles for yoga, dance, and—my favorite—"combat cardio" (shown above). The latter suggests a whole line of consumer-grade adhesive prostheses with which to pad and weaponize our bodies for martial arts and other sports, taking the place of the sagittal crests, browridges, ischial callosities, and other carnage-inducing protuberances denied us by evolution—ideally in a subtle range of flesh-toned camouflage patterns.

Gadget Lab's speed-loving editor Dylan Tweney likes to run barefoot. Or at least he did, until the problems of loping shoeless around the trash strewn streets of San Francisco became obvious. The foot-shaped, glove-like Five Fingers shoes from Vibram are one option, but an even more minimal concept comes from designer Frieke Severs.The Footsticker is a flexible plastic membrane that sticks to your skin like a, well, like a second-skin. There are three designs, each conceived for a different activity. The cream-colored yoga skins, for example, offer high-grip protection for the heel, big-toe and the pad immediately behind the big toe

Other shapes stick on to protect your feet during dancing or "combat cardio", stopping injury to the most used spots of the feet but letting the muscles and bones move over each other without restriction, one of the attractions of doing sports barefoot.You probably wouldn't want to stick these on for a jaunt downtown, though – a Tenderloin junkie's discarded needle still has plenty of flesh to aim for, but for indoor sports they look great. An added bonus is that your feet stay cool, and you won't stink the place up like you do with those old rotting sneakers of yours.

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Vibram Five Fingers

Dance Finger

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