Kendall Jenner wore flip-flops with heels – but that doesn’t mean you should too

Flip-flops are back! Or so I keep reading. Let’s get something straight: flip-flops never really went away. There wasn’t a mass dumping of Havaianas, a brand that sells about 200 million pairs a year. When the company was sold in 2017, it was valued at US$1.1 billion.

Flip-flops as we know them were widely adopted in the United States for beach­wear by the 1960s, and were probably inspired by Japanese zori following World War II.

The rubber thong sandals were given an onomatopoeic name, flip-flop, for the sound they make when they slap against the foot. (It is possible, by the way, to minimise that sound effect, just like you can learn to chew food without making stomach-turning sounds.)

The latest supposed return of the flip-flop was heralded after a paparazzi spotting of Kendall Jenner at a petrol station. She was wearing Simon Miller’s Beep patent-leather thong sandals with a slanted kitten heel. We’re living in an era of apparent amnesia. Similar headlines announced Jenner’s stepsister, Kim Kardashian West, had brought back the flip-flop in 2018, and in 2019. In fact, she has appeared several times in thong heels (below, far right) and wedges, including a pair from her husband’s Yeezy Season 8 collection.

One has to assume the writers of these articles are very young, because anyone who endured the 1990s cannot possibly erase the memories of wedge-heeled flip-flops. Although Proenza Schouler has fully embraced it with its tricolour foam wedge thongs. Manolo Blahnik has been doing kitten-heeled thong sandals for years.