The great ballet-flat comeback has had us digging beat-up Repettos out of our closets and adding Sandy Liang’s candy-colored, coquette mary janes to our online shopping carts. But lately, we’ve been noticing something new happening with the style: The flat’s thin sole has been replaced with a chunkier one and the exposed top now has straps and laces. Is it a ballet flat? Is it a sneaker? It’s actually something else all together: the ballet sneaker.
The ballet sneaker has a ballerina-style, low-top body and a heavy-duty trek sole made of rubber, durable synthetics, or eco-conscious alternatives. Designer Simone Rocha was among the first to do it and debuted the style in September 2020. Since that first shoe, which she calls a “ballet tracker,” she’s created 10 different versions, spanning traditional flats and thick platforms, varying fabrics, hardware, and straps. “It’s a collision and a contrast,” the designer Simone Rocha wrote via email. “A clash of the ballet pump with a more ergonomic technical shoe.”
The most recent iteration of Simone Rocha’s ballet sneaker has taken on a more athletic look with a treaded EVA platform sole that’s designed to be lighter and more flexible. In addition to the pleats and bow at the top, there are now detachable ankle straps and beaded crisscross strap styles for support, and the hybrid shoe is available in various fabrics like satin, silver crinkle leather, and velvet. It’s girlie, it’s feminine, but it’s made for long walks and the city streets — maybe even the rugged outdoors. “The materials change with each season,” Rocha adds.
Rombaut makes a similar style, the Aura, introduced a few years ago and meant to combine creative director Mats Rombaut’s love of dance, with the ballet-flat upper, and raving, with the brand’s signature chunky sole. Its new silhouette, the Aurora, is made for dancing: “The sole is more athletic and lightweight,” Rombaut says. I asked him if he’d consider the shoes ballet flats or sneakers: “I would say sneakers.”
The rise of the hybrid ballet-sneaker style comes among a wave of designer collaborations with technicalwear brands. Last year, downtown designer Sandy Liang teamed up with Salomon, turning the popular XT-6 Expanse style bubblegum pink (her latest show featured a lace-up style tied with satin bows and ballerina sneakers to come). Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen — known for her frilly Scandi-style dresses — embellished a handful of Asics with floral appliqué for spring ’23 and reworked the sneaker into a floral-cutout mary jane for spring. All of these collaborations sold out in literal minutes.
Kiko Kostadinov is another purveyor of the trendy ballet-sneaker style, which creative directors Laura and Deanna Fanning view in a similar light: “We love thinking about them as hybrids, bricolage-ing two styles together,” Laura says, which also applies to the way they design their womenswear collections.
The pair have collaborated with Asics over the past five years and last month, after a year of development, released the buzzy Heaven by Marc Jacobs x Kiko Kostadinov x Asics Gel-Lokros. The duo wanted to subvert the ballet-flat style and then reinfuse it with a sense of Y2K nostalgia. (For inspiration, they looked to the shoes you’d wear as a kid — “young girls’ shoes.”) “Ballet shoes have a formal quality to them,” Laura explains. “Fragility is still very relevant in womenswear and what we wear, and it’s interesting to push that fragility into something that can feel stronger,” Deanna continues. To do so, they added … countless elastic straps and chunky treaded soles.
