Move Over Thigh-High Uggs, Here Come Thigh-High Moon Boots

After Y/Project debuted their gender-netural, thigh-high Ugg boots at Paris Men’s Fashion Week, which we pointed out “looked like a Shar Pei…with their cute caramel wrinkles,” we’ve been waiting for the next frontier in ugly footwear to arrive and it appears it has in the form of…thigh-high Moon Boots.

Over the weekend, Moschino designer Jeremy Scott posted a picture of a model wearing the sexy space boots on his personal Instagram. He also showed versions of the clunky boots that crept up past mid-thigh, including a version covered in pink fun fur, at his F/W 2018 show at New York Fashion Week.

Moon Boots, a proprietary brand owned by the Italian manufacturer Tecnica Group, were first introduced to the world in 1970, after designer Giancarlo Zannatta watched the 1969 Apollo moon landing decided to emulate the puffy shape of astronaut boots. The boots found fans in many ‘80s kids, but never quite managed to recapture public imagination in the same way since.

Similar to Ugg boots, which were designed in Australia to be worn post-surfing, Moon Boots were initially engineered to be worn après-ski. But unlike Uggs, Moon Boots did not have celebrity fans like Sienna Miller and Kate Moss who helped jettison the boots to popularity circa the mid-2000s. Moon Boots have periodically entered the high fashion game – in 2015, Chloé designed a fox-fur version of Moon Boots, and Louis Vuitton created a signature monogram version – but they never quite gained the ubiquity of Uggs.

While it’s unclear whether the thigh-high moon boots will be available for sale or were only made as samples, they are very much one small step for boots, and one giant leap for boot-kind.