Flat Shoe Emoji

🥿 is a flat shoe, drawn on most platforms as a ballet flat: rounded toe, no heel, slip-on construction. Sometimes stylized as a Mary Jane with an ankle strap. Approved in Unicode 11.0 in 2018.

Of all the women's footwear emojis, this one has the quietest energy. The 👠 high-heeled shoe is for going out. The 👡 woman's sandal is summer. The 🥿 is the shoe that carries a fashion-coded, feminine mood without the "dressing up" framing. People send it with outfit pics, shopping posts, and anything tagged balletcore or coquette.

It's also the shoe most likely to read as "I've arrived, I've taken off my work shoes, I'm going to walk the dog now." The emoji has no flirty coding and no ironic coding. What you see is a comfortable shoe worn by somebody who is probably not about to stand up all night.

🥿 sits at a specific intersection: fashion-adjacent content that isn't trying too hard. It's all over TikTok under #balletcore and #coquetteaesthetic, where it cues bows, lace, pastels, and soft-girl styling. Teens and Gen Z pair it with 🎀 and 🩰 in outfit posts. Millennials use it for work-to-drinks transition posts or commuting content.

Brand accounts lean on it hard. Tory Burch, Sam Edelman, Margaux, Everlane, and Mango all use 🥿 in spring and fall shoe launches. Fashion journalists use it as shorthand in newsletters and Instagram captions, often paired with 🛍️ for shopping roundups. On X, it shows up in "I got these on sale" posts and fashion deal accounts.

On Instagram specifically, the emoji reads more mature than 👠 and more polished than 🩴. It's the shoe of somebody who has thoughts about arch support but still cares about what they look like.

The modern ballet flat was invented in a Parisian store in 1956 because Brigitte Bardot couldn't walk on Saint-Tropez cobblestones in heels.

Bardot, a former dancer who had trained at the Conservatoire in Paris, went back to Rose Repetto's shop and asked her to make a leather shoe based on a ballet slipper but tough enough for the street. Repetto used a stitch-and-return construction (sewn inside-out, then flipped) to keep the sole flexible. She named the model Cendrillon, meaning Cinderella. Bardot wore them in Roger Vadim's 1956 film And God Created Woman, and the shoe exploded globally.

A year later, Audrey Hepburn wore slim black flats in *Funny Face*, though hers were made by Salvatore Ferragamo and Capezio, not Repetto. Between the two, the flat became the mid-century equivalent of a sneaker for women who wanted mobility without looking sporty.

The shoe's closed-toe, strapped cousin, the Mary Jane, took its name from a comic strip character. Mary Jane was the sweetheart of Buster Brown, a Richard Outcault cartoon that debuted in 1902. The Brown Shoe Company paid Outcault $200 in 1904 to license both characters. The name stuck so hard that "Mary Jane" is still a generic term for bar-strap flats 120 years later.

The emoji itself is much younger. Unicode approved 🥿 in Emoji 11.0 (2018), the same release that gave us 🥾 hiking boot and 🦵 leg. Apple renders it as a black ballet flat, Google and Samsung draw something closer to a red or maroon Mary Jane.

1. 1902Richard Outcault publishes the Buster Brown comic strip, naming Mary Jane after his daughter. The bar-strap flat takes her name.
2. 1904Brown Shoe Company licenses Mary Jane and Buster Brown characters for $200, building one of the first celebrity-endorsed shoe lines.
3. 1947Rose Repetto opens her boutique at 22 Rue de la Paix in Paris, originally making shoes for professional dancers.
4. 1956Brigitte Bardot requests a wearable ballet flat from Repetto. The Cendrillon model is born and premieres in *And God Created Woman*.
5. 1957Audrey Hepburn wears Ferragamo and Capezio flats in *Funny Face*, cementing the look as an international staple.
6. 2006Tory Burch launches the Reva flat with its oversized gold medallion. It becomes one of the defining shoes of the 2000s.
7. 2018Unicode approves 🥿 as part of Emoji 11.0, released on phones in late 2018.
8. 2023Alaïa's fishnet mesh ballerina and Miu Miu's satin flats trigger a broad fashion-industry return to the style.
9. 2024Ballet flat sales rise 92% year-over-year while classic stiletto sales fall 12%. Christian Louboutin expands its ballet flat offering by 38%.

• •The first modern ballet flat was made because of cobblestones. Brigitte Bardot asked Rose Repetto in 1956 for a street-ready dance slipper because Saint-Tropez was impossible in heels.
• •The shoe's original name was Cendrillon (French for Cinderella). Only later did Repetto rename it after Bardot herself.
• •Mary Jane shoes are named after a comic strip character from 1902. Buster Brown's sweetheart Mary Jane wore bar-strap flats, and the name stuck.
• •Princess Diana wore flats at 5'10" to avoid towering over Prince Charles at 5'10" himself. It's one reason the ballet flat carried through the 1980s and 1990s at all.
• •Alaïa's mesh ballerina flat was crowned shoe of the summer in 2023, single-handedly reviving the entire ballet flat category at luxury price points.
• •Ballet flat sales rose 92% in 2024 while classic stilettos fell 12%. Even Christian Louboutin expanded its ballet flat selection by 38%.
• •Audrey Hepburn wore ballet flats in Funny Face (1957), but hers were made by Salvatore Ferragamo and Capezio, not Repetto. Despite popular myth, she was never a Repetto customer.
• •The #coquetteaesthetic hashtag has passed 18 billion views on TikTok, with ballet flats at the center of the visual vocabulary.
• •The global ballet flat market was valued at $16.2 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $24.7 billion by 2033.