Alexa Chung has been putting unlikely things together since the early 2000s, back when the secondhand Mulberry bag she kept carrying turned into the brand’s Alexa line. Her latest holiday outfit runs on the same logic. The centrepiece is a pair of clear plastic shoes that land somewhere between a jelly flat and a water shoe, and she wore them twice in a day: with a bright yellow Climax Books T-shirt in the afternoon, then with a lavender silk Pucci slip dress after dark.
The shoes come from Cubanitas, a line sitting under the Portuguese footwear brand Cubanas. They sell for roughly 17 euros. Cubanas makes casual anti-slip shoes in PVC and similar water-friendly materials, which is exactly why they hold up on the rocky coastline you get in Greece or along the Amalfi Coast, where a nice leather sandal lasts about one afternoon.
Buying them is the hard part. Cubanitas distributes through European retailers and a few international stockists, and there the sizing thins out and the shipping cost stops being funny. There is no real US distribution.
The jelly shoe came back without them
The trend has been building since 2025, and it no longer looks like a 1990s throwback. Chemena Kamali at Chloé and Pieter Mulier at Alaïa have both sent grown-up versions down the runway, in heels and slim sandals and washed-out pastels rather than the primary-colour plastic most of us wore to a public pool.
The closest thing to Chung’s pair is the Iro jelly flat from Ancient Greek Sandals, about $140 and available in ten colourways, so you can go clear like she did or hide the fact that your shoes are made of plastic.
Five jellies you can actually get
- Ancient Greek Sandals Iro jelly flat, about $140. The dead ringer.
- Tory Burch Mellow jelly Mary Jane, $200. More shoe, less swim.
- Vince Barcelona jelly sandal, $198. Clear, low, quiet.
- Dolce Vita Jam ballet flat, around $58 to $65. The cheapest way into the trend.
- Chloé jelly TPU sandal, $590, and the Alaïa Invisible jelly sandal, $850, if the point is that nobody mistakes them for pool shoes.
- None of them will cost you 17 euros.
