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Ever since The Row debuted a pair of woven plastic sandals on its pre-fall 2024 runway, the divisive jelly shoe has been making a comeback.
According to data analyst Molly Rooyakkers, who runs the Instagram account @style.analytics, there has been over 100 per cent growth in Google searches for jelly shoes in the past month. Pinterest searches for jelly shoes are up 31 per cent in the US and 28 per cent in the UK since this time last year, she adds. Celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Blake Lively and Taylor Swift have been spotted wearing the retro style.
The return of jelly shoes is the perfect collusion of two cultural trends, says Shaun Singh, CEO of media and insight company Death to Stock. “Y2K — and its steadfast influence on fashion and social media for the last decade — and an undeniable lean toward nostalgia,” he explains.
It’s official: jelly shoes are everywhere. But this means PVC — the extremely toxic material from which the majority are made — is too.
“[PVC] is a material so bad that even major plastics users such as the Coca-Cola Company, Danone and Henkel support calling it problematic and unnecessary (as per the US Plastics Pact’s ‘Problem and Unnecessary Material List’ report),” says Sara Brosché, campaign manager at IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network).
Consumer awareness appears to be low. Rooyakkers analysed a sample of 380 comments from six TikTok videos discussing the return of jelly shoes, to identify any mention of PVC or environmental concerns. “The most common topics in these comment sections were nostalgia (mentioned in 62 comments) and negative experiences of the shoes (bad smell, blisters, etc, mentioned in 45 comments), but not a single comment mentioned the words ‘PVC’, ‘plastic’, ‘toxic’, or words that relate to the environmental crisis, such as ‘sustainability’, ‘recycle’, or ‘environment’,” she says.
The impact of PVC
PVC is produced from the highly toxic chemical vinyl chloride (VC), which “is carcinogenic and can damage the nervous system”, says Brosché, who explains that PVC also cannot be used alone and that many toxic additives are incorporated into the final PVC product to provide certain qualities — like being more flexible (plasticisers), or preventing the PVC from degrading in sunlight (stabilisers).
Additionally, dangerous materials such as dioxins and furans are released during the manufacturing and burning of PVC, which is carried out to dispose of the material at the end of its lifecycle. “There are known carcinogens and can cause reproductive and development problems,” says Ron Hu, director of CRM at Bluesign Technologies, which works on the chemical management of fashion’s supply chains. He adds that many PVC products also contain phthalates — linked to hormonal disruption and other health issues — as plasticisers, as well as lead and cadmium. With the use of heavy metals as stabilisers in PVC production, “serious health impacts [can occur] if they leach into the environment or are ingested”, says Hu.
PVC is typically not recycled or recyclable, “but even when it is, this leads to the uncontrollable spread of toxic additives into new products. When PVC is incinerated, a range of toxic chemicals are emitted: dioxins, carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs),” adds Brosché.
What’s worse, is that “highly polluting production and disposal sites are often located in the vicinity of low-income communities around the world”, Brosché says. The harmful chemicals making up PVC often adversely affect marginalised people. For example, Brosché points out that around 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride was released from a freight train that derailed in East Palestine in 2023, polluting the air, soil and water. Ethylene dichloride (which is a byproduct of vinyl chloride) is one of the toxic chemicals responsible for the health impacts in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.
A conundrum for brands
For brands that want to capitalise on the upswing in demand for jelly shoes, it poses a dilemma. PVC is a durable, lightweight water-resistant material, making it well suited for this style of sandal. It is also generally cheaper than other materials to manufacture.
Ancient Greek Sandals is among the brands leaning into the trend this summer. “The jelly sandals are not meant to be a one-hit wonder but are replicas of original designs that were first produced in the 1950s,” says a spokesperson for the brand on the historical legacy of the shoe in the label’s native Greece. “Our goal, which we are working on right now, is to help our customers dispose of and recycle old sandals when they are ready to, in the most sustainable way.” The brand also provides a repair service to fix any faults within the first six months of purchase and provide guidance on how to look after their sandals, with the aim of extending the product’s lifecycle.
The business also notes that the bulk of its sales come from its leather categories, and in this area, it uses chemical-free natural-tan leathers.
Others are exploring alternatives, such as kidswear brand Rainbow Sprout Baby Co, which claims to sell plastic-free jelly shoes based on linen or silicone, and Salter House, which offers hemp-based plastic Jelly shoes. PVC can also be replaced with thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), which is a much less harmful material that has the characteristics of both rubber and plastic. “It is much more biodegradable and will have less harmful byproducts,” Hu says. “The main obstacle would be cost. The cost of TPU is more than PVC.”
For brands that do use PVC, if they cannot ensure the correct channel for recycling the products, the material should be changed, says Bluesign’s Hu. Brosché is less forgiving. “It is clear that producing jelly shoes using PVC will lead to environmental and human health impacts and should stop,” she says.
Although legislation has started to engage harmful chemicals, it’s usually at an end-product level. “There is no international way of control for production and end-of-life issues. Consequently, it is still the industry’s responsibility to tackle such issues from the input stream,” says Hu.
For Brosché, better educating consumers on the impact of what’s on their feet could go a long way towards solving the problem. “I hope that this type of shoe would go out of fashion if consumers knew about the toxic impact they have.”
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