All Your Favorite Summer Sandal Trends Were Born in the ’90s

Reported by Vogue.

Shoes don't just complete an outfit — they date one. And if the early 2000s belonged to the platform boot and the 2010s to the chunky sneaker, the '90s were unequivocally the decade of the sandal. According to Vogue, the silhouettes dominating this summer's runways and street style aren't new at all — they're direct descendants of what Miuccia Prada, Manolo Blahnik, and Tom Ford at Gucci were building thirty years ago: sensual, stripped back, and built for women who had somewhere to be.

The shift made sense culturally. After a decade of power-shouldered excess and uncomfortably rigid heels, the '90s swung hard toward ease. Designers responded with barely-there straps, slip-on silhouettes, and flat leather soles that didn't ask women to suffer for the look. The result was a new visual language — one that Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy embodied outside her Tribeca apartment in Prada sandals, and that Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Gisele Bündchen wore like a uniform between shows. The strappy heel, the thong sandal, the heeled mule — all runway mainstays at Helmut Lang, Calvin Klein, Jil Sander, and Narciso Rodriguez — weren't just pretty. They were modern.

Why These Shoes Never Actually Left

The staying power is in the restraint. A barely-there Manolo Blahnik strappy heel needs almost nothing around it to work — a slip dress, high-waisted denim, a cardigan knotted at the waist. Same goes for the flat sandal, which Helmut Lang and Jil Sander positioned as understated luxury and Jennifer Aniston wore off-duty like it was the easiest decision she'd ever made. The thong heeled sandal — a late-'90s staple from the Prada, Michael Kors, and Calvin Klein runways — has since been adopted by Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner without a single structural update required. Even the flip-flop had its high-fashion moment: Jil Sander spring 1994, Calvin Klein spring 1997, and a generation of West Coast girls who made it their entire personality. Today, The Row and Toteme are selling the same energy.

What makes the '90s sandal genuinely different from trend nostalgia is that it was never really about the moment — it was about function meeting beauty at exactly the right tension point. The closed-toe mule that Carrie Bradshaw wore with a headscarf and oval sunglasses. The open-toed heeled mule that bridged Galliano's Dior glamour and actual wearability. Prada's current runways, Demna's Gucci references — they keep returning to the same coordinates because those coordinates were correct the first time.

The best summer sandal you'll buy this year was designed, in spirit, in 1996 — and that's not a nostalgia trip, it's just good taste holding its ground.

Read the original at Vogue.