Flip-Flops Won: Fall Forgot to Tell Kendall Jenner

Kendall Jenner wore flip-flops to fall. Not as a provocation — as a statement of complete indifference to the seasonal memo everyone else was following. Paired with the kind of wide-leg denim that Hailey Bieber has been quietly installing as the defining silhouette of the year, the combination landed somewhere between boardwalk casualness and the studied nonchalance that takes approximately three hours to assemble. The shoe was the least interesting part. The argument it was making was not.

Here is what is actually happening: the serious shoe conversation for 2026 has collapsed into footwear that refuses to take itself seriously. Hailey Bieber is wearing mules that look like slippers and making them feel like the most considered decision in the room. Naomi Osaka is launching a luxury accessories brand — debuted at a summit in the Hamptons, because of course it was — building on years of treating tennis courts like catwalks, each Nike outfit cross-referenced with collaborators like Robert Wun. The athletes turned the runway into their territory long before fashion officially conceded the point.

Meanwhile, the heel discourse is having a moment it doesn't entirely deserve. Chanel's "barefoot heel" — which is, architecturally, just the rear section of a shoe attached to an ankle strap and nothing else — arrived earlier this year and has since been reproduced by Jeffrey Campbell at a fraction of the price and with the same fundamental design question unanswered: who is this for, exactly? The answer, probably, is that it isn't for wearing. It's for talking about. Chanel understood this perfectly when they priced it. Jeffrey Campbell understood it perfectly when they copied it. The joke lands either way.

What ties all of this together — Kendall's flip-flops, Hailey's slippers, Naomi's handbags, the heel that forgot to include a shoe — is that the most interesting fashion conversation right now is about refusal. Refusal to perform effort. Refusal to signal seriousness through conventional luxury markers. The industry spent years telling people that the right shoe completed an outfit. The current moment is testing what happens when the shoe is the last thing anyone considered.

Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, wore Chanel to the *Practical Magic 2* photocall and looked exactly like someone who understands that some decisions don't require explanation.

That, too, is a kind of power.