Find a piece · Jute-sole espadrille flat

An espadrille is a sole with a shoe attached to it.

By FashionMix Editorial · July 28, 2026

Somewhere between a slipper and a sandal sits the flat that makes a linen dress look like a holiday and a pair of jeans look like a Saturday with nothing scheduled on it. It is the least engineered shoe you can buy — canvas, a run of stitching, and a coil of rope — and it is still the only summer flat that reads as a choice rather than a surrender. Worn well, it is the shoe that gets photographed on other people's holidays and quietly copied for the next ten years.

The rope is the shoe. A real espadrille is built on jute: a plant fibre braided into a rope, spiralled into a sole, pressed flat, and bonded to a thin rubber underlayer so it can survive a pavement. That is where the faint spring underfoot comes from, and the slight lift, and the pale straw edge that announces the whole thing as summer from six feet away. The Chloé Isla sits on exactly that — a jute sole under a striped canvas upper, finished with a tonal knot at the toe.

And here is the part the listings tend to leave out. Below roughly $250, almost nothing sold as an espadrille still has jute under it: the cheaper tier is polyurethane, EVA or moulded rubber, printed and textured to look like rope. They are perfectly good shoes. They are not espadrilles, and they wear like trainers — which is the reason the cheaper pair here costs $250 and not $80. Wear the real thing bare-legged and accept its terms: jute drinks water, so this is a dry-day shoe, and it will take the shape of your foot inside a fortnight and never entirely give it back.

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