Stylish flat shoes for when it's not quite sandal weather
As early as three weeks ago, Marks & Spencer's ballet-teacher flats were selling fast enough to bring tears of joy to their shareholders' eyes.
This is a shoe that neatly solves the conundrum that has bugged Britons for aeons: namely how to dress our feet in spring. It's a semi-open last that can be worn with socks or bare skin, jeans or skirts. It's clearly not a winter shoe, but it doesn't scream sandal either. When you're looking for a seasonal gear change without going straight into fifth, these things count.
Also important are the features that distinguish the ballet-teacher flat from the more ubiquitous ballet flat, namely that tie strap across the top of the foot. So little, and yet so much when it comes to updates. No point in repeat buying replicas of what you already own, unless what you already own is worn out. Within hours of mentioning these in a review of M&S's latest collection, friends and colleagues were messaging me to say they already had them, with pictures of their feet to prove it. These are the shoes of spring. Or one of them.
If you love splattering your cash about the place, you probably have the Miu Miu deck shoe originals that have triggered one of the other spring shoe 'must-haves'. I say originals, but obviously that's only true on Planet Fashion. Paul A Sperry (American, obvs) came up with the prototype in 1935. In 2024, Miu Miu added some twiddly bits, a few zeros and styled them with teeny knicker-shorts (think Emma Corrin). Et voilà. A cult.
Personally I'm resisting knicker-shorts and going for sheepskin linings, like the ones Penelope Chilvers has used inside her suede deck shoes. See what you can do there? Go bare ankled while remaining cosy, a popular idea. They're now waiting for new stock. Meanwhile there's Grenson's wonderful, height-giving double-soled boat shoes.
There are several other styles that immediately update your spring game while providing transitional-season foot coverage. The fisherman's shoe has had a resurgence and looks particularly good with the new semi-shaped midis and maxis. The Mary Jane has been tweaked and now comes with contrasting tips, à la Chanel (useful when you want to co-ordinate them with different outfits).
Mesh is still going strong, but has been given a romantic twist at Mango. Mules have become classics – good for evening, but with a laid-back feel – and the mid-height version blossoms prettily. Florrie London's have padded soles for extra comfort. And my favourite every day-er: the ruched loafer, which may have been 'inspired' by Saint Laurent. Sessùn, a Marseille-based brand, has gorgeous browny-burgundy patent or white ones made from ethically produced leather using non-toxic tanning and dying methods. In other words, something for all styles, all feet – and all consciences.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
39 minutes ago
- The National
Why your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man gives you the ‘ick' factor
That shimmering street grid, and those sandstone bases of unbuilt skyscrapers, will host the most everyday superhero of the current Marvel Universe. Everyday, in every way. It's not just Peter Parker's tentative romance with Mary Jane Watson (and her variants), or his wracked grief on the deaths of his adoptive parents, or his humdrum job as a freelance photographer. But it's also his powers; they too partake of the everyday. In his earliest incarnation, Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, escaped from an experiment. Spider-Man first appears in the nuclear-haunted, cold-warring mid-60s, where the lingering effects of radiation on babies and animals were well known. Not to mention the beginning of plausible genetic engineering. Watching the precursor to the forthcoming Glasgow-based movie, 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home, it's notable that all the villains assembled – Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Sandman, Lizard, Electro – have gained their malevolent powers through exposure to radiation, or biological/cyborg experiment. Just like Spider-Man. READ MORE: 'Ludicrous': BBC bias claims reignite as majority of panellists back Labour Doth this 'good' mutant protest too much against the 'bad' ones? The citizens are consigned to the role of spectators (or squished collateral damage) as these super-humans fight for supremacy. No amount of Peter Parker homeliness – he is your 'friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man', after all, happiest when arresting street thugs – can hide his posthuman weirdery. No Way Home might be the eighth-biggest-grossing movie of all time, but it's lame in the way it resolves this tension – where body modification turns towards good or ill. Parker and friends test-tube up some remedies for the villains, transforming them back into their humdrum, benign human selves. But then Doctor Strange – played by a somnolent Benedict Cumberbatch – has to then 'magic' them back into the parallel universes they've come from. The current Spidey-verse – with a guileless Tom Holland in the title role – is, at this late stage in the Marvel franchise, a bewildering mix of superpowers. Under the techno-influence of Tony Stark, the old struggles with the Spidey costume – stitching it together, hauling it on, repairing rips – are now an automated swoosh from suit to suit. There's also a very funny sequence where previous Spider-Men from parallel universes (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) explore their web-making powers. Garfield and Holland have to keep refilling their cartridges, while Maguire produces it subcutaneously from his wrist (which was creator Stan Lee's original mutation). 'Does it come out anywhere else?' asks Holland guilelessly. This is a nod to the obvious metaphor: the yearning young adult Parker suddenly suffers a condition where white sticky fluid unpredictably erupts everywhere … The actors are given enough room to riff on it. So we're laughing, these days. But I don't think any amount of irony and eyebrow-raised referencing can reduce the essential strangeness of Spider-Man – and for that matter, X-Men, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Black Widow, Ant-Man, I could go on. All of them are the victims of science and technology either gone wrong, or consciously applied to the body, resulting in imposed or desired superpowers. As the box office shows, the appetite is there for stories, however fantastic, of human biomodification. You could render them as giant compensation fantasies. We're coping with our everyday sense of bodily vulnerability to the outcomes of sci-tech, through entertainments that show us gaining power from it – not being polluted and made more fragile and dependent by it. Yet it strikes me that we are much more resistant to the transformations of bioscience than we are to the transformations of AI and automation. We consume all manner of creative narratives, both desirable and cautionary, about computers becoming conscious or purposeful – and it all seems more like a lubricant to the spread of AI in our lives than an inhibitor. When it comes to us and our bags of skin, however, we're just not as embracing of the radical bio-changes that the superheroes undergo, willingly or unwillingly. The safest vector is through disability or health. The pills and therapies that suppress appetite, attack viruses, enable pregnancies, and (who knows) slow down cell decay to prolong life. Even that avatar of techno-weirdness, Elon Musk, who wants to neurologically link brains and computers, does so first in service of the paralysed, giving them some much-needed agency and purchase in the material world. Yet we appear to have an unarticulated, deeply-set norm that kicks back against too much of this. The 'ick' factor is certainly present. Take the Enhanced Games that took place in Singapore the other week. Sportspersons competed in athletics which ignored the fuzzy line between legal performance-enhancing substances and illegal ones. But the games languished under waves of aversive, sometimes even revulsed press coverage. So we revel in the superheroic cavortings of cyborgs and mutants on our screens, while objecting to already finely-calibrated athletic bodies taking a few seconds off a track record, by expanding the pharmacopoeia of their drugs. I'm not complaining! Indeed, I'm desperately grateful that there seems to be some kind of natural, intuitive limit to the kinds of transformations we moderns of the 2020s are willing to undergo. Even the blockbuster entertainments are telling us something obvious, as the Earth is (yet again) threatened with total annihilation in their narratives. Which is that it ultimately, terminally matters how we humans consciously deploy our transforming powers in the world. I will admit to enjoying these bionic characters as modern mythological gods, cartoonishly laying out important dilemmas for us. However, I sometimes crave sci-fi tales in a much subtler register. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is interesting to set alongside these bombastic tales. In its way, it's hardly less monstrous. The whole society in this novel is stable, settled, orderly and utterly cruel: the institutionalised children in it are clones, being grown to adulthood so that they their organs can be harvested for clients. The supportive relationships that comprise much of the novel are to support the weakening young adults, as they are weakened by the surgeries they undergo. This is body modification, but all about submission to the process, accommodating its demands. It's far from radiation, gene therapy or prosthetics enabling you to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Bio-heroes in the blockbusters conduct their sparring in the public sphere, as if they're conducting an oblique argument about the society they're in. For No Way Home, they literally battle across the surface of a scaffolded Statue of Liberty. They're also constantly pursued by an Alex-Jones-like vlogger, casting Spidey as a public enemy. In Never Let Me Go, the bio-subjects are held in a pastoral enclosure, erased from the world that depends on their sacrifice. The crowds gawp at the superheroes: faced with Ishiguro's bureaucratic horror, the crowds avert their eyes. The superheroes at least ask: What happens when your body has power and potential, when what you can do with it amplifies your agency? Ishiguro asks: what happens when the body simply becomes somebody's property? The Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal says the new film will be about 'Peter Parker going to focus on being Spider-Man, because being Peter Parker was too hard'. Cute: his pursuit of Zendaya, as his girlfriend with a now wiped memory of him, will no doubt humanise the story. But Spider-Man – and we haven't even touched on arachnophobia (or is that arachnophilia?) – is properly odd, if you scrutinise him closely enough, and line him up with all his bionic pals. There are important tensions about humanity, technology and the future, hidden behind that bug-eyed mask.
Daily Mirror
43 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
TV teen who needed French polisher in Yellow Pages ad unrecognisable 34 years on
One of the best-remembered ads for the Yellow Pages phone directory featured a floppy-haired teenager waking up to the aftermath of party he'd thrown while his parents were away Before the rise of the internet, we had the Yellow Pages, a comprehensive directory of local businesses – from advice centres to zoos – all vying for your custom, packaged in a hefty, distinctively coloured phone book. In the 1990s, the Reading-based company became famous for its unforgettable TV adverts, each new release bringing a buzz of anticipation akin to the unveiling of a new John Lewis Christmas advert today. These TV commercials even turned their stars into temporary celebrities, long before the era of reality TV, and gave birth to several catchphrases. Anyone around at the time will easily remember the Yellow Pages ad featuring elderly man searching for a book titled Fly Fishing by J R Hartley, with the surprising twist that it was Mr Hartley himself seeking his old publication. There was also the cheeky young lad standing on a stack of Yellow Pages to sneak a kiss under the Christmas mistletoe. And in 2003, Cold Feet actor James Nesbitt was enlisted to rejuvenate the brand, with the actor channelling his character Adam's hapless persona from the show, using the Yellow Pages to navigate tricky situations. But one of the most memorable adverts, first aired in 1991, featured a shaggy-haired teenager waking up on his living room floor after hosting a house party while his parents were away. Venturing into a bedroom, he stumbles upon a stranger on the bed, exclaiming: "Wake up! My parents fly back today," as a small group hastily tidies up the house. Then after his abject horror at noticing a scratch on a wooden table, he turns to the reliable Yellow Pages to find a solution. "Hello, French polishers?" he enquires over the phone, adding: "It's just possible you could save my life." The scratch is skilfully polished away in the nick of time and everything seems fine, until the final moment when the unfortunate lad realises that someone has doodled a beard and glasses onto a woman on one of the family's treasured paintings. The teenager in the advert was portrayed by Nottingham actor Simon Schatzberger, who later played Adrian Mole in a stage production in London's West End, and has since appeared as a Woody Allen-esque character in a stand-up comedy show. Now aged 57, he's also had a stint as David Klarfeld on the BBC soap Doctors and made appearances in EastEnders as a Rabbi, both in December 2018 and again in January 2019. His other television roles include Band Of Brothers, Daniel Deronda and Father Brown. In 2019, Yellow Pages announced it would cease printing its iconic directories, after more than half a century. The final editions of the once-indispensable guide were delivered in Brighton, the city where the directory's original copies were distributed. It boasted 104 editions, each customised to specific areas of the UK, with nearly 23 million copies circulated each year. And in 2023, a perfume was launched that even smelled like Yellow Pages, proving the brand lives on... sort of.
Time Out
an hour ago
- Time Out
Pizza Studio Tamaki Review: Tokyo's cult-favourite pizzeria opens in Singapore on June 10
It's days before the opening of Pizza Studio Tamaki (PST), and we're sitting in its first Singapore outlet in Tanjong Pagar. The Tokyo-based pizzeria takes over the spot that used to house cocktail bar Tippling Club, and apart from doing away with the hanging glass bottle display that used to dangle across the bar counter, all other fixtures remain pretty much the same. The first thing we hear is that since PST Singapore opened reservations to the public recently, it's already seen a jaw-dropping 2,000 tables booked, even before the official launch on June 10. We do our homework before visiting, and that's how we find out about the brand's seriously studded rep – it's been given stamps of approval by Michelin, 50 Top Pizza, and has even hosted the likes of Jeff Bezos and Justin Bieber when they visited Japan. So, will these famed Tokyo-Neapolitan slices live up to the hype? First, a glance at the menu. There are around 12 pizzas categorised as either tomato or cheese-based, over 10 appetisers, desserts, coffee, and several cocktails crafted by Bar on 38 – another famous pizza joint in Mandarin Oriental Tokyo. While it's not master pizzaiolo Tsubasa Tamaki who'll be firing up slices over at the Singapore branch, he's left the job to his trusted protégé, Ryosuke Tanahara, who's trained under him for close to three years, and can replicate his elusive dough recipe to a tee. Speaking of dough, PST employs a highly specific formula developed by Tamaki himself, using a proprietary blend of Canadian and American wheat flour milled in Japan. The dough is lightly fermented for 30 hours – unlike the 48-to-72-hour proofing periods commonly seen in other Italian restaurants – so it achieves a light, fluffy texture which pulls apart almost like mochi. We sink our teeth into the Tamaki pizza ($29), a 12-inch classic topped with Datterini tomatoes, fresh smoked mozzarella, pecorino romano, and fresh basil. Despite being the most simply constructed of the pizzas we'll be trying, it's easily our favourite. The waiter gives us a much-needed tip: gently press down on the cherry tomatoes before eating. Doing so releases a fresh, fragrant waft of sweetness that greatly adds to the experience. But what's arguably better is the fine dusting of salt that we can distinctly taste on the crust. It turns out that the base of the woodfire oven is lightly seasoned with Okinawan salt for an added layer of umami. And if you prefer less char or salt on your pizzas, customisations are more than welcome. The Bismarck ($32) that arrives soon after falls a tad short of expectations, with the Hinata egg cracked in the middle reaching us slightly underdone, but the spicy Arrabbiata ($30) quickly makes up for it. It's got the same Datterini tomatoes, pork nduja, Aomori garlic, and calabria (chilli flakes) that are slow-dried in-house. Being the spice-lovers that we are, we're glad to say this packs a punch. The 5 Formaggi ($34) is equally well done, with a medley of smoked mozzarella, gorgonzola, taleggio, grana padano and mascarpone. The best part, though, is that the acacia honey, which at this point should be known as a mandatory pairing with cheese pizza, comes at no extra charge. We also try several appetisers, from caramelised pumpkins with a balsamic reduction ($16) to Angus beef and pork meatballs in tomato sauce ($18) – all of which are decent but otherwise unmemorable. If you find yourself in the good graces of the reservation system and manage to snag a table, we'd say splash out on the pizzas instead. After all, there are 12 on the menu to sample, with nothing crossing the $40 mark.
