Ariella Starkman, a creative strategist and producer in New York, has a pirate’s booty of Chanel ballet flats in her closet, spread out like a flamboyant flush of cards.
Some she bought new, others she bought old, and all of them she wears with dresses, jeans (baggy and tight), skirts, short shorts or, she said, “everything”.
There’s a bedraggled Pepto pink iteration (“very much my personality”), a classic tan-and-black pair that looks as if an animal chewed on them (“goes with everything”), a quilted white version with a bulbous gel insole (“why would I let plantar fasciitis stop me from looking good?”).
Each toe cap is kissed with a dainty bow and stamped with the raised interlocking C logo of the French fashion house.
When Starkman steps out in her flats, the shoes give her an ensemble mullet: a high-low interpretation that pairs the polite flats with more zany, often tomboyish attire.
This combo is far from the shoe’s classic reputation as polished and Parisian or manicured and uptown.
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Coco Chanel created two-tone tan-and-black slingback heels in 1957, but it wasn’t until 1985, during Karl Lagerfeld’s reign, that the heel was reinterpreted as a ballet pump.
Chanel ballet flats, in their prim and proper Rue Cambon element, are how most women think of the shoe.
Shay Johnson, a producer in New York, bought black Chanel ballet flats with a patent leather toe to wear to her first job, processing loans at Wells Fargo in Birmingham, Alabama.
There, she donned them in the cubicle-minded way Coco may have intended. “They were like my work shoes or my fancy office shoes,” Johnson said.
Lynette Nylander, executive digital director at Harper’s Bazaar, owns “six or seven” pairs of Chanel ballet flats and chalks up the love for the shoe to childhood fashion dreams.
“I think if you’re interested in fashion, Chanel was one of the first brands you had consciousness of or gave you the sense of fantasy,” she said.
“We don’t lose that as women, especially when you get more affluent and you’re able to indulge those early influences.”
But there are no tweed skirt suits among the subset of creative, upwardly mobile women who traipse from Manhattan’s Canal Street to Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, in the flats.
Many of these women have physical jobs and are on set for production or styling.
They wear the flats with baggy cargos, blooming skirts or low-slung jeans.
“They’re like a utility shoe,” Starkman said. “I love that I can wear them in really masculine environments. They add a level of polish when I’m doing the dirty work.”
Many women who wear Chanel ballet flats point to model Paloma Elsesser, who popularised basketball shorts and Chanel flats in the mid-2010s, as an influence.
Elsesser, who attended a predominantly affluent middle school in Los Angeles, remembers seeing the double-C flats.
“I was surrounded by a lot of wealth, but I definitely didn’t feel a part of it,” she said.
When Elsesser moved to New York, a friend, actor Julia Fox, gave her a pair of Chanel baby-pink snakeskin ballet flats.
For Elsesser, who is considered plus-size, the flats felt like a gateway into luxury.
She couldn’t fit into many designer clothes; nor could she afford bags priced in quadruple digits. When she was ready to spend, a US$650 (approximately RM2,660) pair of Chanel flats felt like a chic compromise.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I love a freaky Chanel flat,’ and it was the genesis of how I had married this uptown-downtown aesthetic, which I think I still carry,” said Elsesser, who wore Dickies and Carhartt in the mid-2010s.
“It was always a way to bring in a touch of femininity and luxury to more utilitarian masculine silhouettes.”
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Not all Chanel ballet flats are created equal. The beige-and-black toe caps are certainly sought after but are considered a dime a dozen in the fashion girl world.
There is a hunger for funkier hues like searing pinks, Jolly Rancher reds and playful sky blues, as well as materials like denim or reptile.
The best way to find a flamboyant pair is in places once considered ghastly fashion insults: a duty-free shop at the airport or among the dregs of luxury rejects. Johnson has found some of her best ballet flats in Nice, France, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Elsesser at the Chanel store at London Heathrow Airport.
“People never bought the freaky colours,” Elsesser said, “And they would sometimes go on sale. People just wanted the beige with the black tip.”
But even buying abroad, where value-added tax refunds apply, the ballet flats have become prohibitively expensive.
Many trace the surge in pricing to Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy’s raucous riff on them, churning out pony-hair versions and a rainbow of toe caps listed for upward of US$1,450 (RM5,932) a pop.
Even in the resale market, Blazy’s footwear has taken its toll on pricing.
On eBay, a larger-than-average size 39.5 pony-hair pair sold for almost US$3,000 (RM12,270). On Grailed, ballet flats that look as if they were biblically dragged through the desert for 40 days can set you back US$449 (RM1,837). – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
