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 tbh!”
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 it (“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. Coco Chanel created two-tone tan-and-black sling-back 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, Ala. 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, the 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 Canal Street to Bed-Stuy 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.”
Stella Greenspan, who has been working as a stylist in the fashion industry for more than 20 years, owns several pairs. Greenspan, who considers herself “super tall” and has an aversion to heels, got her first pair after searching for feminine shoes.
“I just needed a shoe that was giving ‘lady’ but was a flat so I could wear my oversize shorts and play with proportions,” she said. “Those shoes were so comfortable. I could wear them all day at work. I’d wear them out at night.”
Many women who wear Chanel ballet flats point to the model Paloma Elsesser, who popularized 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, the actress 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 $650 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.”
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, 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; Elsesser at the Chanel store at London Heathrow Airport.
“People never bought the freaky colors,” Elsesser said, “and they would sometimes go on sale. People just wanted the beige with the black tip.”
But even buying abroad, where tax-back VAT refunds apply, the ballet flats have become prohibitively expensive. Many trace the surge in pricing to the 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 $1,450 a pop.
Luxury bags can appreciate in value, but shoes often do not. “It’s not like clothing, where you can either tailor it or get away with saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to wear this coat as an oversize item,’” said Johnny Valencia of Pechuga Vintage in Los Angeles, who collects and sells rare shoes and clothes. “With shoes, it either has to be exact, or it has to come very close.”
But Chanel ballet flats appear to be a different story. “I think people are under the impression that consumers will pay anything if they’re desperate enough,” he said.
Not so the writer Allegra Samsen, who recently posted a pair of Chanel flats she bought in 2024 on Poshmark for $237 on her Substack chat, hoping to find a replacement pair. The flats were so worn that the heel had eaten through the insole. “I’m not seeing anything below, like, $400, which feels inappropriate,” she said.
Samsen is now searching for other flats, flirting with the Italian label Ballerette, where options hover around $179. “I wanted the bow,” she said, “and the price point felt fine.”
For others, it is Chanel or bust. “I think about every single pair I own, just the way people remember the first big-girl bag they got or maybe a piece of jewelry,” Nylander said. “Those shoes have ascended into that sort of status symbol, and so a rising price makes sense.”
In other words, see you at duty-free.
