How to Wear Sock Booties

In 2016 the entire world was wearing the same shoe. Balenciaga Speed Trainer, knit upper, logo on the vamp, either stiletto or platform. There was only one way to style them: skinny pants, fitted top, tight from head to toe. Eight out of ten street style posts on Instagram looked like this. After about three years everyone got sick of them, secondhand markets saw massive sell-offs, some styles dropped to a fraction of their retail price.

In 2026 sock booties are back, looking completely different. Flat, leather, no logo. Anna LaPlaca wrote a piece on Who What Wear about this comeback, she described them as "more elegant and more everyday." The runways put out a bunch of new takes going in all directions, Bottega Veneta was weaving leather to mimic knit texture, Prada did a skin-tight pointed toe with a low chunky heel, Courrèges deliberately cropped jeans to expose the boot shaft.

Sock booties styled with cropped trousers

The way people wear them has changed. Skinny pants with skinny sock boots is dead.

Now it's loose on top, tight on the bottom. An oversized blazer, straight-leg cropped trousers underneath, flat leather sock booties on the feet. Or a sweater so big it's sliding off the shoulders, pencil skirt underneath, low-heeled sock booties on the feet. The more volume you give up top, the more that snug opening at the ankle stands out. That all-tight look from ten years ago was a stick. Now it's volume on top, tapered at the bottom, there's rhythm.

One thing Courrèges did that season works well for daily life: wide-leg cropped pants with sock booties, deliberately leaving a sliver of ankle between the hem and the boot shaft. Making the ankle the only "tight" spot on the whole body.

With skirts, avoid lengths that hit right at the middle of the calf. When the hemline cuts a line there and the sock bootie cuts another line at the ankle, the bit in between gets boxed in. Above the knee or below the knee both work fine. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was photographed in Paris wearing a corseted dress with sock booties, it got reposted endlessly, the whole point was that the dress and the boots were the same color with no break.

Color might be the single most important rule in sock bootie styling. Pants and boots in the same color, the leg doesn't get chopped into two segments. The moment the color breaks the ankle becomes a dividing line.

Black pants black boots and you're good. Let the hem cover the top edge of the boot shaft, show just a sliver, don't tuck the pants into the boot shaft, the shaft is tight, fabric shoved in there bunches up around the ankle.

For the office swap in a structured blazer with cropped trousers and dark matte leather sock booties, heel three to five centimeters. For evening swap in satin or metallic finishes.

Those are the styling rules. Not that many when you spell them out. Picking the right shoe is actually where more people go wrong than styling.

Most people who look bad in sock booties don't look bad because of their outfit, they look bad because they bought the wrong shoe. The one thing that separates sock booties from every other boot is this: the shaft hugs the ankle. If that fit isn't there, it looks no different from a regular ankle boot, and worse than a regular ankle boot at that.

Walk around the store for a few minutes when you try them on. If you can feel air getting in around the ankle they're too big, go down a size. This year pick butter leather or suede, skip knit. Leather molds closer to your foot shape over time, knit loosens over time, and it doesn't come back.

Fit sounds simple to talk about but it's an engineering problem in practice. The upper of a sock bootie has to be snug but not constricting, stretchy but not slack, and the pressure around the ankle has to be even, not concentrated at any single point. The Speed Trainer sold out worldwide not just because of Demna's name but because that shoe nailed all of these things at once on an engineering level. And the person who nailed it was not Demna.

NSS Magazine did a long interview a few years back with David Tourniaire-Beauciel, Balenciaga's footwear design director from 2016 to 2024. The Speed Trainer and the Triple S were both products made under his hands. The interview was long and covered a lot about his working methods, but the detail that stuck with people most was this: he said that during the development process every single component of a shoe had to make him "feel emotion," and until it reached that standard it wasn't finished.

That sounds like the kind of pretty nonsense designers like to say. Put it in the context of his background and it isn't. He grew up in Romans-sur-Isère, France, a town that's been making shoes for centuries, his father's job was repairing machinery in shoe factories. He didn't learn about shoes from fashion magazines, he learned about shoes from the factory floor. "Feel emotion" in his mouth doesn't mean "does this shoe look good," it means "does the feeling on the wearer's foot come out right once this component is installed."

In the early nineties when he was working at Stéphane Kélian he designed a rubber shoe that sold so well the company's general manager bought champagne for all five hundred factory workers. When he recalled this later he said that was the first time he understood that shoemaking is also an industry, not just an art. Then he went to Maison Margiela and stayed for twelve years. Margiela itself is the kind of brand that is extreme about craft and structure, the Tabi Boot got into MoMA's permanent collection not because it's good-looking but because it proposed something new structurally. Tourniaire-Beauciel soaked in that environment for twelve years.

Demna at the time was still an assistant at Margiela. The two of them later went to Balenciaga together. In 2025 at the Kering retrospective Demna described the starting point of the Speed Trainer in one sentence: "I wanted to make a shoe you just pull on and go." One sentence of direction. Tourniaire-Beauciel took it from there and turned it into a product.

He left Balenciaga in 2025 and went to the Spanish brand HOFF.

Tourniaire-Beauciel's career explains something directly relevant to choosing shoes: why sock booties at different price points feel so different on the foot.

A cheap sock bootie also has an upper glued to a sole, and it might look very similar to an expensive one on the outside. The difference is internal. Whether the stretch across the upper is evenly distributed, whether there's localized pressure at the ankle, whether the speed and force of the sole's rebound is right, whether the shaft starts loosening after two months. None of this shows up in photos, you might not even feel it during a five-minute try-on, but after two weeks it all comes out. When Tourniaire-Beauciel says "every single component has to make me feel emotion" he's talking about exactly these details. When someone spends months tuning these parameters the shoe is comfortable and holds its shape over time. When nobody tunes them the shoe goes slack after three wears.

The Speed Trainer retailed at just over eight hundred dollars. Zara's sock booties run fifty or sixty dollars. These two shoes might look very similar, and they might even feel about the same for the first few days. Two months later they are completely different experiences. But this doesn't mean you have to spend over eight hundred dollars. Stuart Weitzman's entry line at two to three hundred dollars, COS and & Other Stories at around the same price, the leather sock booties from these brands have good enough fit and material quality.

Every 2026 report traces the origin of sock booties to Balenciaga 2016.

Beth Levine. Around 1965. Herbert Levine Inc. She made something called the Stocking Boot, stretch vinyl and nylon, stocking and high heel grown into one, no zipper, pull it onto the foot and done. Nancy Sinatra wore them. Won the Coty Award in 1967. Permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She died in 2006. Not a single sock bootie report this year mentions her.

Sixty-one years from Levine to now. Materials have changed several times over, heel shapes have changed several times over, every so often a new generation of designers circles back to the idea of "making a shoe fit the foot like a sock." The 2016 version is already expired. The 2026 version is leather, flat, no logo. Nobody knows what the next round will be. The category itself doesn't expire. Put some thought into choosing a pair that's leather, fits close, and feels good to the touch, and you'll wear them for a long time without issue.

If your calves are thick buy a shorter shaft, don't let the boot go up to the calf. Leather. If your legs aren't perfectly straight add a bit of chunky heel, skip the full flat. Wear thin socks or go bare inside the shaft, don't wear thick ones.

How to Wear Sock Booties

Join the Oh Darling Community