My summer Ancient Greek Sandals, shall I get the winged ones?

We spotted these last year on Yasmin Sewell’s Vogue blog, and quite simply fell in love with them. Beautifully designed FLAT shoes, now that’s something we don’t see every day in our hooker-heel-chic-loving world. The shoes are made by newly launched company Ancient Greek Sandals and are for me doing to summer sandals what Grenson has done to winter shoes.

It gets better, as these lovely things have been designed by London Cordwainers College graduate Christina Martini (wouldn’t you LOVE that surname?) who has moved back to her native Greece and designed these with a local Greek shoe manufacturer, so you buy them and you’re helping Greek Debt…Fiscal Fashion at its best.

Christina (who used to design shoes for Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton)  works with Nikolas Minoglou, London born but now Athens living son of a shoe manufacturer who uses local artisan craftsmen to make the sandals using techniques used for centuries, indeed if you visit Greece you often see cruder versions of the sandals around, Christina has really sprinkled magic design dust over a traditional idea to make it very beautiful and there are many different designs to chose from.

It’s the detail that I love, the little gold winged buckle, the carved and engraved leather -which is tanned without artificial chemicals and non slip rubber soles. Ancient Greek myth has it that the Gods used to get magic powers built into their pairs, we’d be happy just being able to walk from one end of the beach to another while looking stylish. Although I’m wondering if the winged ones might help me to fly?

A selection of them is available from Harrods, Liberty and Selfridges, if you live close, or from the company website here (warning, heavy postage payment) and I notice Shopbop  Matches and Net a Porter have them too. The sandals start at £110.

This style is my favourite…the Medea

But these look very wearable too…

And these might help me to fly….

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