Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are once again on a demi-royal tour in Colombia, meaning the British tabloids are brainstorming headlines with very inflammatory adjectives in them, and the Vogue team is busy parsing everything that’s made it into Meghan’s Away case for subtext.
Thus far wardrobe-wise, she’s delivered latte-adjacent dressing (Colombia produces approximately 12 million bags of grade-A Arabica every year, after all); a smattering of Princess Diana references (including a pair of diamond-and-onyx butterfly earrings worn by Lady Di in the ’80s); and both a Johanna Ortiz dress and a Juan de Dios skirt (it may have been half a decade since the Sussexes traveled on behalf of the Crown, but the Duchess is still a graduate of the Windsor School of Diplomatic Dressing, Class of ’18, and Ortiz and De Dios are among Latin America’s most esteemed designers).
For anyone looking to make an investment purchase off the back of all of this, however, allow me to direct your attention to Meghan’s footwear during a trip to Colegio La Giralda in Sante Fe on Friday: namely, a pair of two-tone Chanel slingbacks, a shoe that, when spotted in Vogue towers, is met with the sort of “Ooohs!” reserved elsewhere for, say, newborn babies or Internet Boyfriends.
As much a part of the Chanel DNA as the 2.55 or the tweed jacket, it’s Coco who introduced the style in 1957, reclaiming the slingback from risqué affiliations. (In midcentury America, the silhouette had become a favorite of pin-ups of the Bettys Grable and Page variety, an association that Hollywood had beamed across the Atlantic.) Mademoiselle partnered with bottier Raymond Massaro to rework the shoe, lowering and flattening its stiletto to a five-centimeter heel, squaring its toe slightly, and choosing a beige body (to lengthen the leg) and a black cap (to hide any scuffs).
It’s Karl Lagerfeld, however, who introduced the ballerina style worn by the Duchess both this week and at the Invictus Games last September, debuted in 1984 via a campaign fronted by Inès de la Fressange and shot by Helmut Newton. Naturally, it’s proved a bestseller in the 40 years since thanks to its perfect blend of practicality and polish—which, in the end, has always been Meghan’s sartorial MO.