The French have a habit of naming shoes after monarchs, and the Mary Jane is a case in point, since in Paris it goes by Charles IX, after the sixteenth-century king who wore a strapped buckled style at court. Carel has been making that shoe since 1952, when Georges Carel arrived from Grenoble and opened a shop on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, close enough to the Sorbonne that his customers were mostly students. The house mission, phrased with the bluntness that only French copywriting achieves, was to prevent women from walking sadly.
A Heel Designed for Cobblestones
The idea had a technical basis. Couture houses of the early Fifties were sending women out on stilettos, which is a beautiful proposition until you meet an actual Paris pavement, and Carel answered with what became known as the trotter heel, low enough to survive the walk home and high enough to change the line of a leg. Everything the house has done since descends from that compromise between elegance and getting places. The brand spent the Eighties collaborating with Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler, then the Nineties adding transparent plastic and increasingly wild colors, before drifting into the sleepy corner of department stores reserved for labels whose customers have grown up alongside them. The revival began in 2010 when Frédérique Picard took charge, and it produced its defining object in 2014, when the design studio resurrected a vintage model from the archive and named it the Kina. Handmade in Italian workshops, cut with a curve that reveals just the beginning of the toes, it has since appeared in mesh, calf hair and every shade the runway has proposed.
A must-have for many celebrities
Alexa Chung got there first and has been photographed in Kinas so consistently that they function as part of her signature. Emily Ratajkowski, Lily-Rose Depp, Clara Luciani, Angèle and Julia Restoin Roitfeld followed, giving the label the sort of Franco-British endorsement money struggles to buy. The generational handover arrived with Olivia Rodrigo, spotted this year in bright red patent Kinas worn with a plain white tee, a vintage burgundy Coach bag and the Miu Miu plaid skirt that has been circling every feed since spring. The styling made the argument better than any campaign, since a shoe with a seventy-year pedigree slotted into an outfit built entirely from things her audience already owns. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Kelly Rutherford have since joined the list, which suggests the red patent pair has quite a lot of walking left to do.
