The Khy x Gia Borghini heels have arrived, and with them comes the clearest signal yet that Kylie Jenner’s brand is moving beyond the categories that made it. Khy, which launched as a clothing proposition, has now crossed into footwear for the first time, doing so through a collaboration with Italian label Gia Borghini. The debut collection centres on a strappy metallic chrome sandal called the Icon Sandal, and Jenner has already been photographed in it twice: once in a campaign, and once courtside at an NBA Finals game.
What the Icon Sandal actually looks like
The campaign image positions Jenner against a plain backdrop, a choice that pushes all the visual weight onto the shoe and the outfit assembled around it. She wore a halter-neck top in textured grey fabric, its wide V-shaped neckline framed by circular metallic studs running down the inner edges, the back left entirely bare. The matching low-rise micro miniskirt carries the same stud detailing along a wide waistband, with delicate pleated work at the hemline. Makeup ran to bright pink blush placed high on the cheekbones, dark defined brows and a deep berry lip liner. Hair was pulled back into a slicked updo.
Standing with one leg bent, Jenner held the strap of the sandal loosely in one hand, as though the shoe were an accessory in its own right rather than footwear. The Icon Sandal’s shiny chrome finish and buckled straps do carry a particular visual logic: the whole ensemble belongs to that strand of early-2000s aesthetics that has been recycled so frequently it has almost ceased to feel like revival and become its own period style. Chrome, studs, micro proportions, the wardrobe of a particular kind of Y2K fantasy.
Khy x Gia Borghini and the Italian craftsmanship behind the collaboration
The shoes are crafted in Italy, a detail that matters to the positioning of a brand that might otherwise read as purely celebrity-commercial. According to WWD, Gia Borghini is a label with an established record of collaborative work, having previously partnered with Silvia Tcherassi and Elsa Hosk among others. What Khy brings to that relationship is a different kind of reach: Jenner’s ability to move a product from campaign image to cultural moment in very short order.
The proof of that speed arrived before the collection was formally announced to most consumers. WWD also reports that Jenner wore a silver pair of the collaborative shoes to a New York Knicks NBA Finals game alongside Timothée Chalamet. It is the kind of placement that costs nothing in media spend and lands everywhere: the shoe seen in the wild, on a particular body, at a particular event, before it has been formally contextualised as a product. By the time the campaign image dropped, the sandal already had a life outside it.
There is something worth pausing on in that sequencing. The conventional logic of a fashion launch moves from campaign to consumer, from image to object. Here the process ran the other way: the object appeared first, in real social circulation, and the campaign arrived to formalise what had already been seen. It is a pattern Jenner has refined across multiple product categories, and it reflects something about how celebrity-backed fashion now operates, less as traditional advertising and more as a continuous feed of appearances that blur the line between personal style and brand activity.
For Khy specifically, the move into footwear is an expansion that carries some risk as well as obvious commercial logic. Clothing labels that extend into shoes are betting that their aesthetic identity is coherent enough to translate across categories, that the customer who bought into the brand’s vision of dressing will extend that trust to what she puts on her feet. The Italian manufacture and the Gia Borghini partnership (a label with its own credibility in the accessories space) are both gestures toward that coherence.
The Icon Sandal is available now through Khy, marking the brand’s first footwear release.
