Meet the woman who created the perfect ballet flat

It’s not news to meet a woman with a pair of flats in her bag, ready for when she changes out of her heels. Tess McGill was doing that in Working Girl back in 1988. But I have never before met one who is wearing another pair of flats at the time.
When we meet, Jane Frances, of the London-based boutique brand Dear Frances, has her Balla weave strap ballet pumps on her feet (£470, dearfrances.com) and another pair of Ballas — also black, but strapless and in crystal-strewn mesh (£490) — in her black woven Como tote (£695). When I express bemusement, the only explanation she can offer me is that, “The pair I have in my bag are a bit more dressy. I always have a spare pair of Ballas with me, because you never know.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Dear Frances, which was founded in 2016, has, in recent years, been built on the Balla, which it launched for spring/summer 2021. Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to credit the label for the mesh ballerina trend in its entirety. “It wasn’t a big thing that first season. Our regular customers bought it but it took about a year before everyone else went wild.” For spring/summer 2024 the mesh ballerina has to be the most copied style around.
Yet even before the Balla, Dear Frances was one of the most worn accessories brands on the British front row, its boots in particular giving the Pied Piper a run for his money in terms of hooking followers. The black Cade, for example, an ankle boot that is somehow at once stompy and sleek, is a case in point (£580).
All of which has proved vindication for Frances’s original idea — an idea that could have been seen at the time as brave, at best, or foolhardy, at worst. Her goal was nothing less than to create a small luxury accessories brand during an epoch when the successful ones tend to be vast, and powered by marketing budgets to match.
My first question to Frances, 39, who is Australian, is how on earth, at the beginning, she had the guts to do it. She laughs. After studying to be a cordwainer in Italy in her twenties, she interned at the kind of family-owned factory upon which that country’s luxury industry was originally built. “I just loved learning from the artisans on the floor. Those were probably some of the best months of my life. And it was during that time that I started to see a gap in the market.
“There were a lot of either very classic shoes that had that beautiful Italian craftsmanship,” she explains, “or they were very modern, very minimalist and, I felt, lacked that sense of a ‘hand’ in them.” The vision for Dear Frances, she says now, was to “blend those two worlds, bringing that artisanship into the modern world, giving it a directional edge”.
Right from the off she delivered on that vision, creating footwear that didn’t scream luxury but whispered it, and that inhabited that tricky-to-locate sweet spot between classic and cool. Her finance-trained husband, with whom she has a young son, stepped up to run the business side.
While Dear Frances prices were high, it was immediately clear to the consumer why — the quality of its leather and craftsmanship has always been palpable. Said prices also don’t come close to those at many of the household-name luxury brands.
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How has she succeeded? “It’s really about believing in what you’re doing and staying true to it,” she says, a commitment that’s evidenced by her endearing ability to talk with geeky enthusiasm about everything from a toe shape to a strap, not to mention the fact that — she admits — she spends her whole time looking at what women have on their feet. “Always! How could I not be doing that?”
She launched the bag range early last month. “I never saw Dear Frances as only a shoe label. It just needed to be the right moment. It’s been a waiting game.” The ten-piece line-up is exactly the kind of stealth wealth proposition I was expecting, but with that added cool girl touch that the brand is so good at, as well as its signature butter-soft leather.
It’s a launch that is perfectly timed for anyone finding the four-figure price tags on lots of luxury bags too high to stomach. It’s also good news for the many — myself included — who own some Ballas. That tote in which she has her spare pair — also available in plain black leather (£595), and as flat as the world’s most sophisticated pancake — is perfectly proportioned to carry them.
The Dear Frances woman, she says, is “someone with a quiet confidence. She really understands that luxury is an investment, not only in terms of the price but the time involved.” She is a woman who is also uninterested in recognisable branding, the opposite of a logo junkie. (Although a few extremely subtle logos have crept onto some of the bags.)
The brand’s largest market is America, no doubt aided by celebrity sightings such as Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, but the UK comes in a close second. Its best customer — who lives in New York — must have “about 50 or 60 pairs”.
“It’s not easy,” Frances continues. “There’s a lot of noise out there, and a lot of brands that have the ability to be much louder than we can be. But I don’t think every woman is looking for that. Ours is the customer who wants a point of difference.”