I want to have a word with the woman who spent 1996 convinced an ankle strap sandal was aging on anyone over thirty, some kind of ingenue footwear that expired the second you got a mortgage. She wore flats for a decade out of pure principle. She was wrong, but it took a long time and a lot of other women in their fifties wearing them well before the message got through. That’s really the story of this category over the last thirty years, it went from something you weren’t supposed to wear past a certain age, to something nobody blinked at, to right now, where it’s back in a big way and somehow more forgiving than it’s ever been.
What’s winning me over currently is a low, thin strap that sits right at the ankle bone instead of higher up the leg, because the higher versions do something genuinely unkind to a calf that has lived a full life, mine included. The lower strap just sits there quietly and lets the shoe do the work.
I’ve got one pair with a small block heel that I can actually walk a full day in, and one flat pair I bought purely because the strap has a tiny bit of stretch to it, which sounds like nothing until you’ve spent an afternoon at a wedding standing on grass in shoes that don’t give an inch.
Here’s the part nobody puts in the copy. By the end of August my feet look like I’ve been branded. A clean strap line across the top, pale skin underneath, tan everywhere else, and it does not fade quickly. My sister saw mine in September and just looked down at my feet for a second too long, which from her means she’s noticed and isn’t going to say anything kind about it.
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I’ve stopped wearing the strap sandals to anything where I’ll be barefoot again soon after, that’s the one rule I’ve actually learned to follow.
The gamble pick, and I’ll say it plainly, is the version with the strap that wraps twice and ties at the side. It looks fantastic on a slim ankle with the right pant length, and it looks like you’re being restrained on almost anyone else, myself included on a bad day. I bought it anyway. I wear it maybe four times a summer, always with real intention about the outfit around it, and I don’t regret it, but I’d never tell someone it’s a safe first pair.
Will any of this survive past this season. The low strap will, I’d bet on that one lasting another twenty years the way the style always eventually does. The double wrap I give even odds, it’s had its moment before and it’ll disappear again, and that’s fine, some things are only meant to work for a while.
