Luxury Briefing: Platform heels are primed for a 2025 comeback

January 1, 2025 Mary

This week, an exploration of whether an emerging, potentially disruptive fashion trend has legs.

Platform heels are inching their way back onto the scene.

In 2024, retro platforms turned up at cultural events including the Met Gala, the Oscars and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n Sweet Tour. The celebs and influencers sporting the style largely opted for affordable takes readily available on the market. Now, more designer brands are introducing their own takes on high-drama platform styles.

Since the start of her tour in September, five-foot-tall Sabrina Carpenter has been credited with bringing back platform boots — many of her stage costumes are anchored by five-inch, $300-350 styles by Naked Wolfe. And in May, Kim Kardashian, Doja Cat and Janelle Monáe made headlines by showing up to the Met Gala wearing Pleaser’s $50-$60 platform heels. Other high-profile platform sightings included Kate Beckinsale’s look at Variety’s Power of Women event, Florence Pugh’s outfit at the BAFTA Awards, Liza Koshy’s look at the Oscars, and the list goes on. Adding to the style’s appeal, in March, now-79-year-old Helen Mirren told British Vogue she’s worn Pleaser’s six-inch “stripper” platforms on red carpets throughout her career.

As with many modern trends, the style’s popularity doesn’t seem to be the result of runways’ influence. Instead, culture has put it back on the map, and designers are turning out styles accordingly.

As noted by Edited footwear analyst Katharine Carter, select designer styles helped fuel the trend in 2024. They included Chloé’s fall 2024 Maxime platform wedge sandals, which attracted much attention at the brand’s Paris Fashion Week runway show in February. They were worn by front-row VIPs including Sienna Miller, Kiernan Shipka, Georgia May Jagger, Pat Cleveland and Clémence Poésy, among others. Carter also called out Marc Jacobs’s Kiki boots, which first launched in 2016. They drew buzz this year thanks to new iterations worn by stars including Ice Spice, Lady Gaga and Cynthia Ervo.

“Across stockists, 61% of Kiki arrivals in 2024 went out of stock, and the pastel pink style sold out in under a month on the brand’s website,” Carter said. “And the Marc Jacobs x Wizard of Oz collaboration, which transformed the Kiki platform into Dorothy’s red shoes, achieved a sell-out within six days of arriving.”

Designers clearly believe in platforms’ trend longevity. On the spring 2025 runways, Chanel showed platform toe-capped heels and brogues, Chloé debuted more wedges, and Versace — “an original instigator of the platform revival in 2022,” according to Carter — showcased square-toe platform heels.

It would be a wild exaggeration to say that the pendulum is swinging the other way after years of comfort-first footwear trends — think: sneakers, flats and loafers. But fashion fans hungry for drama are indeed making room in their shoe rotations for platforms, hinting at an eventual vibe shift.

It makes sense that the style is resonating, said Thom Solo, an American footwear designer whose namesake brand released a $695 platform heel dubbed the Opera early this month.

“The world is intense in more ways than one. But when we put on a pair of heels, it changes the way we carry ourselves,” Solo said. “In a way, we were lucky that the Opera’s release aligned with a time of need to disassociate a bit from reality.”

Solo decided to become a footwear designer after coming across Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection — including the Armadillo shoe made famous by Lady Gaga — while studying sculpture at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Starting in 2008, he got his foot in the door by creating one-off styles worn by Daphne Guinness, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, the latter in her “Work Bitch” music video. But when the pandemic hit and the demand for bespoke footwear fell off, Solo overhauled his custom business to instead focus on more accessible shoe collections.

“With all of our shoes, we want to make something other-worldly and built on escapism, but they must also have full functionality and [provide] comfort,” Solo said of his brand. “Funnily enough, the [6-inches-tall] Opera is the most comfortable pair of shoes we’ve made.”

According to Solo, he and his team spent over a year perfecting the Opera’s design. Based on demand, it will soon be offered in more colorways and fabrications, including Mongolian hair. The style has already been worn by FKA Twigs, Doechii, Richie Shazam, and Latto, among others.

Solo said personal shoppers and stylists have been instrumental to his brand’s growth, as have the Instagram posts featuring their work. “The minute we post [a celebrity] wearing our shoes, our site traffic goes up like crazy,” Solo said. “And some fans are extra diehard. The minute you’ve got the seal of approval from Mother Monster [Lady Gaga], the fans are in.”

Thom Solo’s typical shoppers are women ages 28-57 who relate to the “energy” that Solo builds into his brand, he said. He described it as the “feminine growl,” best portrayed by “Miley Cyrus shaking her hair out and kicking over her microphone stand at the 2024 Grammys.”

“What’s so beautiful about independent designers is that we get the opportunity to hearken back to why we all got interested in this [field] in the first place, which [for me] is etherealism, escapism and storytelling,” Solo said. “And those things have largely fallen out of the luxury conversation.”

Thom Solo has an angel investor and is working toward opening a brick-and-mortar store, with the long-term goal of operating brand stores in every major city.

According to Circana footwear and fashion accessories analyst Beth Goldstein, referring to Circana’s retail tracking service, sales of high-heel shoes three inches and taller have been strong since 2022. “2022 was a comeback year for dress shoes, and while this category as a whole did well, platform styles outperformed non-platform styles, in terms of growth,” she said. In 2023, the category softened again after women had replenished their dress shoe wardrobes the year before, but sales of platforms continued to grow, per Circana data.

This year, despite platforms’ moment in the cultural zeitgeist, consumer preference in the mass market has favored more modest heel styles, including kitten heels and pointed-toe slingbacks, Edited’s Carter said.

Of course, any heels reflecting traction shows a step in a new direction.