Best Designer Flats for Women: Ballet Flats, Mules and Ankle Straps

The flat has quietly eaten into territory the heel used to own, even at the dressier end. Jimmy Choo's Lova beaded suede mules keep the embellishment and the slide-on ease of a mule but drop the height, which is the whole point right now. Alaïa's fishnet ballet flats do something similar from the opposite direction, taking a shape as plain as the ballet flat and giving it a textured, almost hosiery-like surface. Raffia and canvas turn up here too, softening the line between a going-out shoe and a beach one. The common thread is texture doing the work height used to do.

Raffia has moved off the espadrille and onto almost every flat shape going. Odissi's Lima rafia ballet flats take the material and pull it into a rounded, classic toe rather than the usual woven wedge. Andrea Gomez's Dani canvas leather sandals pair raffia's textile cousin, canvas, with leather strapping, which keeps the sandal from reading as too casual. Both treat natural fiber as a finish rather than a beach signifier. The result is a sandal that could just as easily show up at dinner as at the pool.

Crochet is the other texture doing heavy lifting in flats this season. Odissi's Iris crocheted flats turn an open, lattice-like knit into a shoe you can actually walk in, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Alexandre Birman's Lia leather sandals sit at the other end of the same idea, using leather straps pared down to almost nothing. Between them is a whole range of rafia ballet flats built on the same logic of visible, textural construction. None of these shoes hide how they are made, and that transparency is the appeal.

What ties this edit together is texture standing in for height. Beading, raffia, crochet and fishnet all give a flat shoe the presence a heel used to provide, so the foot stays low but the look does not read as understated. Jimmy Choo's beaded mules and Odissi's raffia and crocheted flats prove the same point from opposite directions, one dressed up with embellishment, the other kept plain but woven. Alaïa's fishnet flats sit somewhere in between, texture without added material. None of this reads as a downgrade from heels, more like a different way of signaling effort. If you take one thing away, it is that the flat now has to work harder visually to earn its place, and the ones here do it through surface rather than shape. I would reach for the raffia first for daytime and save the beading for dinner.