Among the snake heels and jeweled sandals Saint Laurent sent down its spring 2027 runway in Paris was a pair of clear, lace-up men’s dress shoes with a name that needed no translation: “O. Fan.” Yes, like OnlyFans. The shoe’s designer explained the joke to Women’s Wear Daily, and the explanation says a lot about where fashion’s attitude toward the platform has landed.
“Everyone knows that’s the new obsession of gay communities, to show their feet on OnlyFans,” said Corrado De Biase, the house’s freelance design director of men’s and women’s shoes, who has been with Saint Laurent for a decade. “So why not celebrate this?” The transparent design, he said, began as a running gag in the studio, a joke about why men are so shy about showing their feet when plenty have beautiful ones. The shoe also fit creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s concept for the show, which moved from early morning light into night. De Biase framed the nod as part of the house’s DNA, saying founder Yves Saint Laurent was tied to young, outsider communities in his own early days.
A luxury house naming a shoe after OnlyFans would have been unthinkable not long ago. Now it barely registers, because the content creation platform has been seeping into fashion for years, on the runway and behind it.
At London Fashion Week last month, designer Natasha Zinko staged “Pay Per View” as an official OnlyFans collaboration, sending branded shorts and “Pay for View” pants through a venue chosen to resemble a panopticon. Katie Price, Drea de Matteo, and Kelly Osbourne walked as the prisoners on display, watched by an audience cast as the jailers. Creators are also appearing on runways in their own right: Sophie Rain walked Miami Swim Week in May and New York Swim Week in July, fielding online complaints that she wasn’t a “real” model along the way.
Then comes the money. Fashion is in a rough patch. The collapse of multibrand retail has squeezed independent labels, and designers are hunting for revenue that doesn’t depend on a department store buyer. Louis Gabriel Nouchi, the founder of Paris menswear label LGN, started an OnlyFans for the brand in January and has said that going viral on Instagram taught him a hard lesson: “Likes are not sales.” LGN’s page is free to follow, with teasers and previews up front and the “snack content,” mostly priced under 10 euros, behind a paywall. Nouchi isn’t posting nudes. He says he’s fetishizing the clothes, not selling bodies, and he describes the platform as a safe space for his gay customer base thanks to written model authorization and stricter age verification than some dating apps.
Nouchi is far from alone. Elena Velez and Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour partnered with OnlyFans on merchandise and documentary-style runway videos for OFTV, the platform’s safe-for-work streaming app. Rick Owens, never one to miss a provocation, launched a foot-video account last summer with a $5 subscription, routing the proceeds to La Maison d’Allanah, which supports at-risk trans youth and refugees. He told a fashion writer the project began as an exercise in vanity and mortality, and that it wasn’t exactly raking in the dough as some people may think.
Nothing has changed over recent years except people’s reaction to OnlyFans. Designers aren’t hiding their OnlyFans projects or treating them as a dare anymore. They’re pitching them as a business model, one that cuts out middlemen and brand-deal dependence in exchange for OnlyFans’ 20 percent cut. OnlyFans, for its part, is leaning into the fashion world. The company has been working for years to outgrow its adult-only label, adding OFTV, signing athlete partners, and promoting comedians and researchers, and a Saint Laurent shoe is the sort of cultural endorsement no marketing budget can buy.
Of course, fashion has always borrowed from whatever the culture is whispering about, then charged a premium for it. The open question is whether the industry is embracing OnlyFans as an economic partner, or just flirting with its aesthetic until the next trend arrives.