Jennifer Lawrence has spent the past 12 months making increasingly strange statements with her feet. Take, for example, the moment she decided to wear flip-flops with a Dior Haute Couture ballgown on the Cannes red carpet. Or the photographs that surfaced while she was house hunting in Los Angeles in skin-toned ballet flats that were thin and transparent enough to reveal the outline of her toes.
There have since been non-shoes, jelly shoes, millennial socks and half-shoes. The actor was yesterday afternoon photographed strolling around Manhattan in what looked like space-age slippers with pin-striped jogging bottoms, an outsized Leset shirt and Luv Lou sunglasses. The whole thing rode on what Allison Bornstein coined the wrong shoe theory in 2023. “I realized what makes a look feel interesting is the addition of accessories that feel slightly ‘off’ or mismatched,” the stylist said last June. “It just forces you to mix things up and try something that might totally blow your mind.”
To step out in a shoe that jars with the rest of an outfit on a visual and conceptual level suggests there is intention and choice behind the clothes. That you’re not just another celebrity with The Row’s press team on speed dial, but capable of spotting the beauty in something unusual and nonsensical. But it most importantly suggests that there is a little mischief at play, which is something Lawrence has successfully built an entire brand around.