{"id":115200,"date":"2026-08-31T14:52:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T14:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&#038;p=115200"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:04:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:04:22","slug":"carel-paris-shoes-celebrities","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget Ballet Flats \u2014 These Are the Cult French Mary Janes Worn by Olivia Rodrigo, Lily-Rose Depp and Alexa Chung"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-115201\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"7427\" height=\"4951\" \/><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">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 <em>Charles IX<\/em>, after the sixteenth-century king who wore a strapped buckled style at court. <strong>Carel<\/strong> has been making that shoe since 1952, when <strong>Georges Carel<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n<h1 dir=\"ltr\"><strong>A Heel Designed for Cobblestones<\/strong><\/h1>\n<figure id=\"attachment_115202\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-115202\" style=\"width: 2000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-115202\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"3000\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-115202\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Daisy Edgar-Jones<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">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 <strong>Jean-Paul Gaultier<\/strong> and <strong>Thierry Mugler<\/strong>, 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 <strong>Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique Picard<\/strong> 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 <strong>Kina<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n<h1 dir=\"ltr\"><strong>A must-have for many celebrities<\/strong><\/h1>\n<figure id=\"attachment_115203\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-115203\" style=\"width: 1080px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-115203\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1080\" height=\"1380\" srcset=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3.jpg 1080w, https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3-235x300.jpg 235w, https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3-801x1024.jpg 801w, https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3-768x981.jpg 768w, https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3-400x511.jpg 400w, https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/08\/carel-paris-shoes-celebrities-3-155x198.jpg 155w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1080px) 100vw, 1080px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-115203\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Olivia Rodrigo @carel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>Alexa Chung<\/strong> got there first and has been photographed in Kinas so consistently that they function as part of her signature. <strong>Emily Ratajkowski<\/strong>, <strong>Lily-Rose Depp<\/strong>, <strong>Clara Luciani<\/strong>, <strong>Ang\u00e8le<\/strong> and <strong>Julia Restoin Roitfeld<\/strong> followed, giving the label the sort of Franco-British endorsement money struggles to buy. The generational handover arrived with <strong>Olivia Rodrigo<\/strong>, spotted this year in bright red patent Kinas worn with a plain white tee, a vintage burgundy Coach bag and the <strong>Miu Miu<\/strong> 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. <strong>Daisy Edgar-Jones<\/strong> and <strong>Kelly Rutherford<\/strong> have since joined the list, which suggests the red patent pair has quite a lot of walking left to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42787,"featured_media":115204,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[17],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v18.5 (Yoast SEO v20.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Forget Ballet Flats \u2014 These Are the Cult French Mary Janes Worn by Olivia Rodrigo, Lily-Rose Depp and Alexa Chung - Grazia USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Founded in Paris in 1952, Carel makes the Mary Janes worn by Olivia Rodrigo and Daisy Edgar-Jones. 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