Why Stylish Guys Are Suddenly Obsessed with Ballet Flats

Max Berlinger
·7 min read
2

Photographs: Reuben Perin, Alec Feldman, Getty Images

Last spring, chef Danny Bowien picked up a pair of Balenciaga Leopold satin ballet flats as a little gift to himself. Ever since, he’s worn them so often that the sole is starting to detach in the front, though he’s just duct taped them back together. “It’s cool to let them get all beat up and not be precious with them. It’s like how Amy Winehouse wore them,” Bowien says. “They’re just so easy to throw on, they’re comfortable, they’re easy to pack when you’re traveling.” On Instagram, Bowien has posted himself wearing them with shredded jeans or cargo shorts and socks, riding bikes or schlepping to his beloved SoulCycle workouts. He even wore a baby blue pair, complete with a dainty toe bow, to the GQ Global Creativity Awards back in April.

He’s since picked up a beautiful pink pair from his good friend Sandy Liang, which he tries to save for special occasions—but can’t help wearing on the regular. “I was talking to my girlfriend about this last night,” he says. “Like, do I even wear them that much now that it’s getting cold? And she said, ‘Danny, you live in them.’”

Bowien is at the front end of a growing movement in certain menswear circles. Over the past year or so, a new class of sleek, barely-there footwear for men—which, indeed, recall simple ballet flats when not flat-out copying the dance shoe silhouette—have emerged. And while the idea of them may yet give some men pause, there’s a perfect storm brewing that’s toeing the line toward the mainstream.

Reuben Perin, a buyer at the Tribeca boutique La Garconne, first considered a pair of ballet flats earlier this year, too, when the shop brought in a pair from the beloved French label Lemaire. They were in women’s sizing only, but Perin discovered that he could squeeze into a size 40. “Because of the shape of the toe,” he says, “it doesn’t read as ballerina. It reads more like a subverted loafer.”Indeed the brand showed both male and female models in the style for its Spring-Summer 2024 collection, a graceful finishing touch to its signature flowing, monastic designs.

“It’s a nice idea,” Perin adds. “It feels fresh. We’re really overloaded with loafers, and this is a cool iteration of it.”

<cite class="credit">Reuben Perin</cite>
Reuben Perin
<cite class="credit">Reuben Perin</cite>
Reuben Perin

He liked his Lemaire flats so much, in fact, he’s since picked up another style from the rising Italian label Magliano—a funkier pair made from velvet with a squared off toe, Vibram soles, and a Mary Jane style T-strap. “They’re a bit more eccentric,” he says. “But they’re insanely comfortable, they’re like sneakers, like a Nike Air Rift without the split toe.” Perin wears both pairs with tapered, oversized trousers, washed blue denim, or baggy shorts when it's warmer out. “They’re surprisingly versatile. The Lemaires have been my workhorse shoes lately.”

Alec Feldman, a New York-based law school grad, clocked ballet flats in the collections of some of his favorite designers over the last season: Sandy Liang, Miu Miu, The Row, and Simone Rocha among them. He used his Halloween costume—as Rachel Berry from the TV show Glee—as an excuse to pick up a pair from Zara as a trial run. “I usually wear a black boot or loafer, and I wanted to play with a new footwear silhouette,” he said. “And this really goes with my personal style, which has a bit of a feminine or romantic element to it. I just saw them and thought they were chic and easy.”

<cite class="credit">Alec Feldman</cite>
Alec Feldman
<cite class="credit">Alec Feldman</cite>
Alec Feldman

Where did the men-in-ballet-flats trend begin? Casey Lewis, a former magazine editor who now writes the popular newsletter After School, suspects that the first foot was planted by Harry Styles, who wore a pair of white dance shoes with wide-leg jeans on the cover of his Harry’s House LP last spring. “I’m a longtime Harry fan and I think he can kind of pull off anything,” she says. “It’s really interesting to me the way that he’ll wear something and all these hip New York guys will start doing it.”

Serendipitously—or, depending on how you look at it, shrewdly—a small contingent of influential brands have thrown the footwear style some love. In Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu collection for Fall-Winter 2022, notably, ballet shoes were shown with socks and tennis skirts on a parade of androgynous models. There’s also The Row’s dainty slip-ons; the “deconstructed loafers” from the Spanish brand Hereu; Maison Margiela’s Tabi Mary Janes; and, in a surprise twist, the classic Parisian brand Officene Generale showed its Spring-Summer 2024 collection with enough ballet flats to make a normal guy want to jete into them.

“In the past men wore heels, and low-cut shoes are worn by men in various artistic disciplines such as ballet," Hereu co-founders Jose Luis Bartolomé and Albert Escribano told GQ via email, who say their ballet-flat-esque styles have been well received by customers of all genders. “We live in a time when silhouettes in general are not so strict in terms of gender. The design and manufacture of our shoes start from classic silhouettes and are reinterpreted without taking into account the gender of the person who will buy or wear them.”

Lewis, of After School, thinks a few things are at play. A big ballet flat wearer herself, she notes that this recalls the late-aughts ballet flat heyday (think Blair Waldorf in Gossip Girl and the omnipresent Tory Burch flats), and, indeed, nearly two decades on the nostalgia for that time has helped bring them back into the cultural conversation. “I’ve been waiting for the day for the ballet shoe to be cool again,” Lewis says. “It’s a very ‘The Row’ look, clean lines, minimalist, like a rich Tribeca mom.”

Bowien noted that the ballet flat was also popular with the indie-sleaze-adjacent American Apparel cohort in the early ‘00s. In fact, he says, he used to wear Capezios around that time, so the Balenciaga is a return to form. “I’m older now, and a dad, and it’s the first time that I’m seeing things from my youth come back around.” he says. “This feels like a direct response to all those oversized, huge shoes, like the Balenciaga Triple S.”

Feldman is unsure if the shoe will be widely adopted—like other unexpected styles like Crocs and Uggs—but he certainly gets plenty of compliments when he wears them out. He got a big response online recently when he wore his ballet flats with a more traditionally masculine pair of Realtree camo pants. “People on TikTok were really obsessed with that camo pant-ballet flat look, which I wasn’t expecting,” he says. “But I did think it was a cute outfit.” Now that he’s successfully integrated the Zara flats into his wardrobe, he’s hoping to invest in a fancier pair from Simone Rocha.

Bowien, too, has received a lot of positive feedback. “I was walking around Dimes Square,” he says, “and I was like, I don’t want to get trolled by all these high school kids, but I’ve been surprised by how complementary people have been. A lot of people recognize the Sandy Liang ones and are like, ‘Oh cool, I didn’t know they made them for men.’”

Perin noticed plenty of other men wearing the shoes in Paris during the most recent Fashion Week. He noted that Lemaire is bringing the style back for another season, a telling sign that we may just be at the precipice of a wider ballet shoe moment. “You know, give it a shot,” Perin suggests. “Some things aren’t as crazy as you think. If you have an inkling, then don’t be afraid to try it.”

Originally Appeared on GQ

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