The year was 2013 and I was just starting out in my first real job working in the fashion closet at my favorite fashion magazine. As such, I found myself constantly surrounded by the latest must-have trends, which I sadly could only afford to covet, not buy. The item at the top of my dream shopping wish list? A pair of two-tone, cap toe Chanel espadrilles. These simple flats were everywhere, worn by every influencer (then just bloggers) and up-and-coming top models. Seriously, for anyone interested in or working in fashion it was impossible to escape these espadrilles. It felt as though they were in every magazine, on the feet of every celebrity and in so many of the street style photos I routinely pinned to my Pinterest board.
Of course, by the time I was making enough money to potentially save up for a pair of my own, the trend tides had turned—Chanel’s cap-toe espadrilles had fallen from must-have status to being an indication that you were wearing last season’s styles (the horror). They became cemented in my mind as a shoe emblematic of the mid 2010’s. So imagine my surprise when I received an email from Koio with images of the brand’s latest collection featuring a black-and-camel, cap-toe espadrille nearly identical to the pairs I coveted a decade earlier. Is this shoe really making a comeback?, I wondered. Well, I now feel confident saying, yes, the flat espadrilles are back and ready to become a staple of your 2023 wardrobe.
