Forget Ballerinas, The Jazz Shoe Is Now Lily Collins’s Preferred French-Girl Flat
The star of ‘Emily in Paris’ took in a match at the French Open wearing not a Repetto ballet flat, but rather a lace-up jazz shoe.
Reported by Vogue.
The Jane Birkin summer playbook is basically writing itself at this point — tres français woven baskets, '60s shift dresses, Repetto ballet flats — and if your Instagram feed looked anything like ours this weekend, you already know. The aesthetic has colonized every corner of the internet, from Cou Cou Intimates pop-ups to every influencer who's ever held a bunch of flowers like a prop. It's pretty. It's also very, very done.
Which is exactly why Lily Collins's recent French Open appearance deserves your attention. According to Vogue, the Emily in Paris star showed up not in the ballet flat that has become practically a uniform for Kaia Gerber and Olivia Rodrigo, but in the Repetto Zizi — a lace-up jazz shoe with roots far more interesting than the ballerina. The Zizi was originally the shoe of Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin's iconoclast ex, which means Collins quietly reached into the same reference pool and pulled out the cooler, more subversive artifact. A perfect bob and a stripped-back monochrome look completed the picture. No zebra print in sight.
The Jazz Shoe Has Always Been Smarter Than the Ballet Flat
The distinction matters more than it might seem. Ballet flats read softness, femininity, the kind of effortless-girl-in-Paris fantasy that's been commercially packaged so many times it's lost its edge. The jazz shoe — structured lacing, flat sole, slightly androgynous silhouette — has always belonged to the art school crowd and the iconoclasts. The fact that Marc Jacobs has been spotted wearing the Zizi style says everything: this is a shoe with a point of view, not just a vibe.
Collins on screen has always leaned hard into maximalism as Emily Cooper — the kind of character whose wardrobe triggers genuine alarm responses in the aesthetically cautious. But off camera, her instincts are clearly sharper and more restrained. Choosing the Zizi isn't a rejection of French-girl style; it's a more rigorous reading of it. Gainsbourg's Paris was never a mood board. It was a whole attitude.
If you're going to do Gallic this summer, the jazz shoe is the move — because the best version of any reference is always the one that fewer people thought to steal.
Read the original at Vogue.
