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FitFlop has signed up Belgian designer Ester Manas for a five-style footwear capsule landing 3 September across FitFlop.com and select retailers worldwide. Manas has spent the past seven years building a label defined by adjustable, size-inclusive garments that run from XS to 3XL. The capsule reworks FitFlop’s mule through faux fur, pony hair, and platform soles, priced between €130 and €220.
The Delicato mule sits at the entry point, €130, a flat-soled slide with crossed straps. It comes in black faux fur, a brown-and-black faux fur mix, and an olive green faux fur version built on a low wedge. Step up to €180 for the Gen-FF Back-Strap mule, a buckled slingback on a platform sole available in cow print with a gold buckle, a burgundy speckled colourway with matching gold hardware, and a green speckled clog-style iteration.
The PlatFForms mule tops the range at €220: a platform slide with a block heel, offered across five finishes that include burgundy faux fur, an olive fuzzy version with a wide strap, a brown-and-cream faux pairing, a pale green fuzzy style with a chunkier heel, and an olive furry option with its own wide strap detail.
Two sneakers round out the offer at €140 apiece: the Dash FF, a lace-up with a dark animal print upper and chunky rubber sole, and the Retro-Q FF, which pairs a burgundy speckled pony hair upper with a white sole.
FitFlop built its business on cushioned, orthopaedic-adjacent comfort soles, and the brand’s chief product and brand officer, Louise Noble, has pointed to Manas’s ability to make pieces that feel desirable and carefully considered. Manas took FitFlop’s existing mule silhouette and pushed it through three separate reinterpretations, each finished with a sharper, squared-off toe designed to elongate the foot.
The materials lean heavily on texture, giving the range a plush, tactile finish across the board. Manas has said the collection draws on women who surround and influence her work day to day, a theme that also runs through her main-line runway shows.
According to Manas, the collaboration came about organically. Neither she nor her creative and life partner, Balthazar Delepierre, designs footwear for their main line. She’s been candid that they aren’t trained footwear designers, which made the project as much of a technical challenge as a creative one. The label kept FitFlop’s existing mule shape intact and channelled its own point of view into the surface treatment and the strap hardware.
Manas summarised the philosophy behind the finished product as minimal effort, maximum impact. That restraint carries through to the release structure: a limited run of 96 individually numbered pairs will be sold as an exclusive edition, with the broader capsule releasing alongside it through FitFlop’s own site and a handful of stockists.
Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre founded their eponymous label in 2019 after meeting at La Cambre in Brussels. The brand’s technical signature, adjustable couture techniques like ruching and drawstrings, lets a single garment fit a far wider size range than conventional cuts, and the brand has built its entire identity around producing one-size or two-size pieces instead of standard S/M/L runs.
Manas pointed out the approach works commercially because it forces stores to stock a size that actually sells. It remains the only label on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar dedicated solely to size-inclusive collections. That positioning won the pair an ANDAM Special Prize in 2023, worth €100,000, and a year of mentorship from Frédéric Maus, following LVMH Prize and ANDAM finalist placements in 2020 and 2021.
SZA, Jorja Smith, Kali Uchis, and Beth Ditto count among its highest-profile wearers. Manas, who wears a French size 44-46, has said the original impulse behind the brand came from her own frustration at being sized out of the fashion she was designing during her studies. Roughly 80 per cent of the brand’s materials are recycled or pulled from dormant stock.
Manas took the past year away from the Paris runway calendar to focus on her family after the birth of her first child, and she used the break to write publicly about a trend she’s watched with concern. She has argued that fashion’s embrace of size inclusivity has thinned considerably, with plus-size representation increasingly limited to custom pieces built for a single magazine cover or campaign image that never make it into a retail assortment.
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