What are we doing here? Hailey Bieber has just taken her balletcore styling in a very unexpected direction and I’m confused. On September 27, 2023, Bieber posted a lengthy Instagram carousel that included a picture of her extremely trendy pink ballet flats, which she styled with a single ankle sock and anklet. But why?
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The vibe these days is for one’s fashion ballet shoes to look as similar as possible to actual ballet shoes, which is why styles with elastic straps like the ones Bieber wears in this pic are currently the coolest iterations seen on the streets. (You may have seen fashion elites wearing similar Miu Miu ballerina slippers around town.) We also know that Bieber has been leaning hard into balletcore lately, demonstrating the perfect ballerina bun, going pantsless in Paris, and modeling baby pink tutu-inspired minidresses. So maybe the single sock is meant to evoke the look of athletic tape a professional dancer might wear on an injured ankle? Bieber’s the one who used to be a ballet dancer, so she’d know better than me.
I suppose what’s fun about balletcore style is that you can take it in a variety of creative directions. In the 2000s, ballet-inspired styles included little shoulder shrugs (my dad used to refer to mine as “thneeds”); in the ’90s everybody started wearing leotards (since rebranded as bodysuits) as tops; and the ’80s brought us leg warmers as streetwear (thank you, Madonna and Olivia Newton John). And yet, somehow, I still just can’t see the single sock thing catching on in the mainstream, no matter what Hailey Bieber says.
