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Find a piece · Square-toe embellished flat

The flat that became a franchise.

By FashionMix Editorial ·

Type the name and the search bar finishes it for you: Michaela flats, Michaela mary jane, Michaela square toe. When a single style earns its own autocomplete, something in the design is doing real work, and here it is the toe. Sam Edelman squared it off — not the brutal chisel of a runway loafer, a soft square, closer to a French manicure than a box — and that one decision moved the flat from ballet-adjacent to something with intent.

The Michaela now comes in five fabrications, and the ladder tells you what each material is for: jelly at $46 for the pool months, knit and buckled versions in the $140 range for the commute, and this one at the top — sheer mesh scattered with crystal, the so-called naked shoe done as a flat. Mesh flats are everywhere this year; most read as tights with a sole. The gems are what keep this pair from disappearing on the foot, catching light exactly where a plain mesh shoe goes flat.

At $150 it sits in the honest middle of the embellished-flat market, where the designer versions start at four times that before the crystals get counted. But the useful thing about a franchise shoe is that you don't have to leave it to spend less. The same square toe, the same last, comes in jelly for under fifty.

The piece

Sam Edelman Michaela Square Toe Gem Embellished Mesh Mary Jane Shoes — square-toe embellished flat
Square-toe embellished flat

Sam Edelman — Michaela Square Toe Gem Embellished Mesh Mary Jane Shoes

$150at Bloomingdale's

Find it for less

Sam Edelman Michaela Square Toe Jelly Flats — square-toe embellished flat

Sam Edelman — Michaela Square Toe Jelly Flats

$46— Not a lookalike from somewhere else — the same shoe, cut on the same last, in the material that costs a third. It trades the crystals and the evening for rain, cobbles and a summer you don't have to be careful in. Buy this one first and find out whether the square toe suits your foot before spending $150 to answer the same question.

at Bloomingdale's

Style it with

Reiss Gemma Scarf Print Dress — dress
Dress

Reiss — Gemma Scarf Print Dress

$163at Bloomingdale's

Where it goes

If the square toe feels like a commitment, the round-toe original this shape was pushing against is argued on its own page.

For the evenings that outgrow a flat, the heel built for standing through all of it picks up where the mesh leaves off.

Come June the same ankle line goes coastal with the espadrille wedge with a front zip.

More pieces

No name, just a photo

This page starts from the name. When all you have is the screenshot, how to find a flat from a picture ranks every method that works, Google Lens included.

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