Where do mary janes get their name? As the story goes, the original Mary Jane was a young female character created by the American cartoonist Richard Felton Outcault in 1902 for his “Buster Brown” comic strip. She was based on Outcault’s daughter of the same name and wore little black shoes with a strap across the instep. When Outcault later licensed his characters to the Brown Shoe Company, the name stuck, and the shoe has been seen as a sort of sweet, childish style ever since.

Because they’ve been around for so long, mary janes are perennially in fashion but have a moment in the sun every so often. Now is one of those times. Labels like Miu Miu , Reformation , Marc Jacobs , and Sandy Liang have dropped their takes, and aficionados of the weird-girl and balletcore aesthetics a

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