On the dramatic flights of Dance of the knights, taken from Romeo and Juliet (1935) by Prokofiev, young models advance with closed faces. On this January afternoon, for the Dior Men fall-winter 2024-2025 show, they wore striped double-breasted coats, wool mini-shorts with long zipped flies, sophisticated turbans, brocade capes or toile de Jouy… On their feet, ballerinas, in leather or quilted satin, with or without a crossed elastic on the front. “We reworked this dance shoe in a more masculine volume, in homage to Rudolf Nureyev, who intersected with my personal history, since my uncle, Colin Jones, also a dancer, was his friend and photographed him,” says Kim Jones, the men’s artistic director of the French house.
Men in ballerinas? It is the new fad of certain fashion brands, from Balenciaga to Thom Browne, from MM6 Maison Margiela to Dries Van Noten or Bode, which has made it a signature. In France, Lemaire, which offered a model in black Nappa leather for spring-summer 2023 with a buckle strap, saw fit to renew its production for spring-summer 2024.
Derived from heeled shoes for balls of the Ancien Régime, pointe shoes appeared in the West, at the beginning of the 19th century.e century, first at the feet of dancers, allowing them to raise themselves to extend their bodies to the extreme. A technique “historically linked to the performance, at the Paris Opera, of Marie Taglioni in The sylph in 1832″, resituates the researcher Mélodie Le Lay in the catalog of “Walk and approach. A history of shoes”, exhibition organized at the Museum of Decorative Arts in 2019.
“A niche offer”
But, in the middle of the 20th centurye century, this stage slipper comes to the city, flat. While, in the United States, the manufacturer Capezio created refined pairs for the stylist Claire McCardell, in France, Rose Repetto, opened a workshop in October 1947 which supplied the Paris Opera. The legend may have mainly remembered the ballerina Cinderella, imagined for Brigitte Bardot in 1953 and seen in And God created the woman (1956), by Roger Vadim, “the very first Repetto dance shoe was created for a man, the son of the founder, the star dancer Roland Petit, we recall within the brand. She had developed for him an extremely flexible slipper that followed the movements of his painful feet, using the sew-and-turn technique. a seam made on the wrong side before being put back on the right side.
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