When Margaret Qualley stepped onto the red carpet for the London premiere of The Dog Stars, the Chanel barefoot sandals on her feet prompted more conversation than almost any shoe manages in a season. The footwear in question: a black heel cap, minimal straps gripping the back of the ankle, and then, nothing. The rest of the foot left entirely exposed to the air and to the internet’s imagination.
A Heel That Is Barely There at All
The sandals belong to the Chanel Cruise 2026/27 collection, Look 34, and were shown alongside a black gown with a V-shaped plunging neckline, the fabric textured and fringed from collar to hem. As a total look, it has the quality of something assembled from contradictions: maximum coverage above the waist, maximum exposure below it. The shoe is less a shoe than a punctuation mark, a bracket around the heel that leaves the question of the foot unanswered.
According to Nine.com.au, the sandals originally made a splash in April when they were unveiled on the runway at the Chanel cruise 2027 show, where they appeared in various colours. Their arrival at a London premiere, worn on a foot in motion rather than a runway in stillness, is a different proposition. The internet, encountering them in the wild for perhaps the first time, responded with the predictable mixture of bafflement and delight. One commenter wrote that ‘Achilles is gonna love one of these,’ a reference to the Greek mythological hero’s heel. Another called them ‘bikini for feet.’ A third, with the resigned precision of someone who has been watching luxury pricing for years, offered: ‘Chanel really said what if a shoe but only for one direction of the foot and charged $800 for it.’
The reactions are funny, but they are also a form of genuine engagement. Fashion has rarely had a better indicator of a design landing than the moment the internet starts generating its own language for it.
Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel Debut and What It Signals
What gives the moment additional weight is its context within Chanel‘s current trajectory. As Yahoo Entertainment reports, the dress was designed by Matthieu Blazy, and the cruise collection it comes from is his first since joining Chanel as the maison’s creative director in December 2024. A debut cruise collection is an unusual laboratory: it travels to an international location, it is shown to press and clients before the main-line collections, and it tends to carry something of the new hand’s instinct before the full pressures of the mainline schedule arrive. That this particular instalment produced a shoe that the internet cannot stop looking at is, at minimum, an arresting opening statement.
Blazy’s tenure will be watched closely, not least because his predecessor Virginie Viard held the role for several years after Karl Lagerfeld’s death and the house has been recalibrating its codes ever since. A fringed black gown paired with what is essentially a heel prosthetic reads as a house testing how far its vocabulary can be stretched without losing legibility as Chanel. The answer, judging by social media, is: quite far, as long as the logo is somewhere nearby.
The London premiere itself was for The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic film based on the novel by Peter Heller, in which Jacob Elordi plays Hig, a man navigating a world devastated by a virus that has killed half of humanity, including his wife. The film opens in theatres on 28 August. It is the kind of material that calls for a certain gravity of dress, and Qualley’s fringed Chanel gown delivered that, even if the shoes turned the gravity briefly on its head.
The sandals will presumably appear again, on other feet and at other events, as the cruise collection continues to be worn through the season. The runway iteration in April came in various colours; the black version Qualley wore is the most severe, and the most photographed. Whether any subsequent sighting generates quite the same velocity of internet commentary is another question. Viral moments in fashion tend to have a first mover: the Chanel barefoot sandals premiere in London may well be it.
