Jelly shoes have made it into another summer, and they are looking a little more surreal than they did a year ago.
The 2025 jelly shoe comeback was easy to map: The Row’s viral netted flat, Skims’ sold-out jelly style, Melissa collaborations and a steady current of childhood nostalgia put the plastic summer shoe back into rotation. This year, material and form are doing more of the work, giving the trend more to run on than a quick hit of nostalgia.
Chloé has pulled the jelly shoe toward something softer and smokier. After Chemena Kamali helped push the material forward on the spring 2025 runway, the house kept developing it for summer 2026 with transparent TPU mules and sandals, including runway-marked Junie styles with clear uppers and kitten heels and mule styles.
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By the fall 2026 show in Paris, Chloé had already built a front row jelly lineup: Maggie Rogers wore the black Jelly Mule, a peep-toe style with a gathered knot and curved kitten heel, while Paris Jackson and Brooke Shields went sharper in the transparent Lixi pump.
Just two months later, Apple Martin modeled the latest iterations in the Chloé à la Plage Campaign. The shapes have also moved off the front row. Hayley Williams has been spotted in the house’s Sunny Brown Jelly Sandal several times during her current “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party” tour, pairing the translucent thong style with sheer layers.
Loewe gave the plastic-material story a playful 2026 update without leaning on ’90s nostalgia. In the house’s spring 2026 shoe campaign video, one clear pump seemed to make a break for it, moving across an escalator and past a swimming pool as though it had slipped free from the foot. The bit worked because the runway had already made transparency feel a little uncanny: Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez showed clear kitten heels with colorful sockettes, high-vamp uppers and sculptural little heels that made the foot look layered rather than bare.
The jelly spread widened from there, especially once brands started dropping the material into existing shoe codes. Nike’s Rejuven8 Run Jelly went sport-tech, reworking the brand’s 2008 recovery shoe as a translucent PVC cage with a removable mesh bootie — part water shoe, part cage sneaker, part Y2K recovery runner. Monse x Sperry pushed the same molded read into prep, recasting the Authentic Original 2-Eye boat shoe in translucent Mandarin Orange and Seaglass while keeping the moc-toe shape and woven laces intact.
Melissa, still one of the most obvious jelly shoe authorities, took the softer surreal lane with Susan Fang, bringing jelly into floral ballet flats, Sakura platform details and opaque-to-clear gradients. By the time Tory Burch folded jelly heeled sandals and translucent accessories into Splash, alongside raffia, crochet and ocean-color resort pieces, the material had a full high-summer retail language around it.
That is where the staying power starts to make sense. Jelly still has the oddness that made it divisive in the first place, only now it has better shapes to work through: knotted peep-toe mules, clear kitten heels, removable mesh booties, molded boat shoes and smoky sandals that pull the material out of pure nostalgia.