Like the dramatic episodes of "Dance of the Knights," from Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (1935), young models moved forward with expressionless faces. On this January afternoon, for the Dior Men Fall-Winter 2024-2025 show, they donned striped double-breasted coats, wool mini-shorts with long zipped flies, sophisticated turbans and brocade and toile de Jouy capes. On their feet were ballet flats, in leather or quilted satin, with or without a crossed elastic band at the front. "We reworked the ballet shoe in a more masculine way, in homage to Rudolf Nureyev, who crossed my personal history since my uncle, Colin Jones, also a dancer, was his friend and photographed him," said Kim Jones, the French fashion house's artistic director for men.

Men in ballet flats? It is the latest fad for a number of fashion brands, from Balenciaga to Thom Browne, from MM6 Maison Margiela to Dries Van Noten and Bode, who have made it their signature style. In France, Lemaire, which offered a black Nappa leather syle of ballet flats with a buckled strap for Spring-Summer 2023, saw fit to renew its production for Spring-Summer 2024.

Derived from heeled shoes for the balls of the Ancien Régime (from the late Middle Ages to the French Revolution), pointe shoes first appeared in the West in the early 19^th century, first on the feet of dancers, enabling them to hoist themselves up to elongate the body to the extreme. It is a technique "historically linked to the performance, at the Paris Opera, of Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide in 1832," said researcher Mélodie Le Lay in the catalogue of Marche et démarche. Une histoire de la chaussure ("Walk and Approach: A History of Shoes"), an exhibition organized at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2019.

However, in the mid-20^th century, this stage shoe made its way into the city. In the United States, Capezio fashioned refined pairs for designer Claire McCardell, while in France, Rose Repetto opened a workshop in October 1947 to supply the Paris Opera. The legend may well have remembered the ballerina Cinderella, designed for Brigitte Bardot in 1953 and seen in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu... Créa la Femme (1956, ...And God Created Woman). But "the very first Repetto ballet shoe was created for a man, the founder's son, prima ballerina Roland Petit," the brand said. "She designed an extremely supple shoe for him, which followed the movements of his aching feet, using the 'cousu-retourné' technique," or a seam sewn on the reverse side before being put back on the right side.

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