Some people can wear pretty much anything and look good – there’s a magical combination of genetics, confidence, talent and sheer flippin’ je ne sais quoi that some people just have. Harry Styles is one of those people.
Styles by name, style by nature. Pink vinyl trousers? Ringmaster-esque dungarees with no shirt underneath? Flares the size of a house? He’s pulled them all off, looked great every time, and become a fashion icon in the process. If he wore flippers and balanced a Cornish pasty on his head, flippers and a Cornish pasty would become trendy.
Any time he tries out a new look, style bibles like GQ and Esquire breathlessly explain how you, too, can look as good as Harry Styles, while failing to acknowledge that he has a bit of a head start by being, you know, Harry Styles.
Most of us aren’t like him. It would take a decades-long training regime, extensive plastic surgery and a series of magic spells for me to have an iota of the magnetism that guy has – owning the same cardigan as him isn’t going to do it. (It would be nice though. If anyone wants to send me a cardigan, please do.)
His latest trendsetting habit? Wearing a pair of ballet flats. This feels a bit more doable for your average guy than some of his fashionable forays – sure, his particular pair of shoes, from Miu Miu’s Autumn/Winter 2025 range, go for £750 at Harrods, but there’s an eBay seller in Warrington with adult ballet shoes for £14.
And so, that is how a few days later I came to own some shoes that are flat in both name and nature. (This is the first time shoes have ever been delivered through my letterbox. They could probably be fed through a printer without too much trouble.)
Can I attempt to channel my inner Harry Styles and see if I – a notably unspectacular middle-aged man – can also make ballet flats my spring shoe?
Mike decided to channel Harry Styles by purchasing a pair of adult ballet shoes on eBay for £14‘Maybe I can grow to like them’
Now, first impressions: my version of ballet flats are not the same as Harry’s, but at less than two per cent of the retail price, I guess they were never going to be. They’re also not, er, in my humble opinion, nice. They look really bad, in fact. His have an arty bow on the front, while mine come with a short length of shoelace, to be fashioned into a non-functional knot.
They’re also flimsy as hell, and as far as I can tell, offer no foot support of any kind. It’s like wearing a couple of leaflets. If I stood on a penny, I could tell you if it was heads or tails. Without support, protection or structure, they raise large existential questions about what a shoe actually is.
There is an additional hitch with this pair of shoes: I worry that the two are, in fact, identical shoes – not left/right mirror images of one another like every other shoe in the world. Just the same shoe repeated twice.
Maybe I can grow to like them. I try to convince myself they’re a little bit like the shoes Shaolin monks wear when doing martial arts demonstrations. But if I’m honest with myself, they’re more like Beavis and Butt-Head’s cartoon shoes: just nondescript black shapes at the end of my legs. I’ve been wearing big clompy boots throughout the winter, so these tiny shoes also look too small for my body, like I’m a drawing and the artist ran out of space.
But Harry Styles wears these, sort of, and people love him. Maybe my own inner star will come out after a few hours in them.
Mike quickly learned that walking through wet grass in nothing-proof ballet shoes is ‘revolting’‘I lead a different life to Harry Styles’
It’s a horrible day outside, so I do some cleaning, and despite my pop star shoes, when I’m elbow-deep in the toilet scrubbing away I somehow don’t feel like an A-list style icon. Can’t think why.
A little later I ventured outside when the weather cleared and something immediately became clear: I lead a different life to Harry Styles.
His new album is called Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, while my equivalent would be Be Behind on Work All the Time. Hoover, Occasionally and it simply wouldn’t sell.
He lives in Los Angeles; I live in South Cambridgeshire. Harry wore his ballet flats on the baking tarmac of LAX airport, while the lawn outside my house is sopping and overgrown. It’s that part of the year where I can’t mow it until it dries a bit, but it can’t dry because of all the rain. This isn’t an issue facing Harry. He’s not traversing the muddy paths of East Anglia.
I quickly learned that walking through wet grass in nothing-proof ballet shoes is, as a multi-sensory experience, revolting. It’s got echoes of standing in a puddle in just your socks.
The thing with someone like Harry Styles is, everything he does seems deliberate and considered, filtered through the enormous star-ness of him. If he wears something unusual, it’s not unusual anymore, it’s cool. I, however, am the most unremarkable man in the world. If I wear anything that isn’t incredibly normal suburban dad-wear, it looks like something has gone hideously wrong.
Harry has often been named the best-dressed person in music. I’m not even the best-dressed person in my house. A leftfield choice of footwear doesn’t seem like a fashion statement on me, it looks like someone nicked my shoes or I trod in dog dirt. For Harry, Miu Miu. For me, doo-doo.
My eight-year-old daughter is horrified and confusedHarry Styles can also dance. I can’t. In fact, the word “can’t” is nowhere near strong enough for just how unskilled I am in that area. I begin to feel self-conscious: how dare I walk around in ballet shoes when I possess no rhythm whatsoever? It’s like someone parading around in head-to-toe cycling Lycra, helmet and all, then revealing they don’t have a bike, can’t ride and barely know what a bike is. Is wearing these shoes deeply offensive to dancers?
Another sad realisation I make while tramping around in the grass is that, due to these being designed for ballet, I’m possibly the fattest bloke in the world to sport a pair. I’m not fat, but have you seen ballet dancers? Harry just broke a record, as 11.5 million people registered for presale tickets for his New York residency. And I’m breaking a record of my own: tubbiest dude in ballet shoes. We’re not so different, he and I.
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Read More My daughter is confused and horrified
Asking around for opinions: my eight-year-old daughter is horrified and confused, which strikes me as unfair, since she used to do ballet and I was always perfectly nice about everything she wore.
I try not to make eye contact with anyone else as I walk down the street, but that isn’t hard – I have to concentrate where I’m treading, because even the smallest of pebbles hurts my feet like hell. It’s like the Princess and the Pea, but manlier.
Or is it? They’re not the manliest of shoes, but I’m not the manliest of men. But then, ballet, pop stardom, all the performing arts, have always confused people: outrageously hench men in pastel-coloured tights, strong enough to lift a truck but choosing to spin around instead. Harry Styles is absolutely ripped and could clearly kick the hell out of anyone he chose to, but he chooses to sing about kissing, and is globally adored. That sounds… really nice?
My fashion takeaways
I’ve no doubt there are plenty of other super-trendy dudes out there that can absolutely make ballet flats look cool. Right now, there’s probably a guy wandering around Brooklyn in a pair, buying a really complicated coffee and looking impossibly amazing while doing so. But I don’t see smelly normies like me getting enormously into them.
They’re rubbish shoes to lead a normal life in. By design, there’s not much you can do in them, so the only reason to wear them would be to look good. But they don’t look good.
It feels like, if taking inspiration from famous style icons, you can’t just pick one high-fashion item and slot it into an outfit that’s otherwise been farted together with zero thought. It looks like you’ve found your clothes, or nicked each element from a different person as they slept.
Someone like Harry Styles makes it look easy, but he’s spent over a decade in the world of posh fashion — he knows what he’s doing. I don’t, and shan’t, and will leave fancy footwear to people like him.
For now, my ballet flats are going in One Direction: to the charity shop.
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