We look back at one of fashion’s most surreally imaginative pairs of footwear: the Isabel Canovas Banana Shoes.
Remember when Isabel Canovas made banana shoes? Crafted for the designer’s spring/summer 1989 collection, the Isabel Canovas banana shoes are deftly made of leather and silk, and currently sit in the Museum of Metropolitan Art’s permanent collection, though they are not currently on display. (Met curators, if you’re reading this: free the shoes!)
The Isabel Canovas banana shoes are beautifully done; completely mesmerizing with their natural, soft spotting just like a real ripened banana. The tops and sides of the shoes are covered with realistic peels of silk, flying back towards the wearer. Little is documented about the surreal banana shoes and Canovas. There are barely any interviews of the designer and her line was incredibly short-lived. What we do know is that Canovas was based in Paris and had a boutique in New York where she frequently released surreal, expensive collections. She was a fashion icon in her own right and often wore her own work. “Canovas often carries a bag of her own design,” wrote Ruth La Ferla for The New York Times in 1990. “One of her favorites is shaped like a dwelling of milk-carton dimensions and trimmed, Russian-style, in embroidered passementerie.”
Isabel Canovas worked as a designer in Paris at Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton before branching out and starting her own infamous namesake line in the 1980s in Paris. She often incorporated animals, nature, fruit and vegetables into her designs. The brand closed its doors in the early 1990s, making Isabel Canovas’s work extremely collectible.
Aside from the famed banana shoes, you can find Isabel Canovas belts, a rare hat or two and sometimes ready-to-wear on the secondhand market. But by far, she is most known for her jewelry. “Shoppers have become accustomed to the staggering price tags of Isabel Canovas’s creations, but also to their unusual and imaginative touches,” Carrie Donavan wrote for The New York Times in 1988. “At the moment, the designer, inset below, is fascinated with crawly creatures that she charmingly translates in metal, stones, sequins and embroideries.”
But back to those infamous banana shoes: almost once every five years, fashion gets a fascination with weird footwear. The viral content of “freaky footwear” is going strong for summer 2025. The time is once again now. And every brand from the weird shoe OGs like Prada and Demna’s Balenciaga to newcomers like Tory Burch (now on a mission to make experimental shoes her thing) to Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry, are creating pieces that focus on the toe, or are in some way, brilliantly saturated in irony, art and quirky references.
Isabel Canovas’s banana shoes undoubtedly look exactly like something we’d see today from designers Jonathan Anderson or Daniel Roseberry.
We’ve always loved an unsettling choice of shoe here, whether it’s peeling Margiela Tabis or Celine Phoebe Philo era furry heels. What these all have in common is that they play with humor, provocation and imagination. Long live the banana shoe.
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