Margaret Qualley made a quiet kind of noise at the world premiere of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars in London on Thursday night.
The actress arrived at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in a black Chanel dress covered in circular fringe and a pair of the house’s most talked-about shoes from Matthieu Blazy’s Cruise 2027 collection: the so-called barefoot sandals. The design is little more than a small leather heel cap stamped with the interlocking CC logo and thin straps tied around the ankles. There is no sole. Her toes, the balls of her feet, and most of the rest sat directly on the carpet.
It was the first time a major star has taken the polarizing runway piece into the real world. The shoes first appeared in April at Chanel’s Cruise show in Biarritz, where they immediately divided opinion. Some saw them as a clever inversion of the house’s classic cap-toe. Others simply asked how anyone was supposed to walk in them. Qualley, a longtime Chanel ambassador who first walked for the brand as a teenager, answered the question by putting them on a premiere carpet that was deliberately covered in dirt and plants to match the film’s post-apocalyptic setting.
The rest of the look stayed in the same collection. The dress featured a deep V-neck, short sleeves, and an uneven hem that swayed with the fringe. She wore Chanel high jewelry — the Coromandel Vol Suspendu earrings and an N°5 drop ring — and kept her hair long and center-parted. Her pedicure was black, which was hard to miss.
The Dog Stars, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, follows a pilot (Jacob Elordi) and a hardened survivalist (Josh Brolin) in a world mostly wiped out by a flu pandemic. Qualley plays Cima, a young medic. The film opens in theaters on Aug. 28. Elordi, who also fronts Chanel campaigns, stuck to a more conventional navy pinstripe suit and actual shoes. He was joined on the carpet by the film’s canine co-star, a Belgian Malinois named Rak Jasper.
The appearance comes a little more than a month after Qualley and Jack Antonoff confirmed their separation. The pair, who married in 2023, have both emphasized that the split has been handled with care. Qualley has largely stayed focused on work since the news broke.
Fashion watchers immediately zeroed in on the shoes. Some called the choice bold. Others wondered about the practicality of walking nearly barefoot on concrete. Either way, Qualley turned a runway experiment that many treated as a joke into something that actually happened in public. That alone made the night memorable.
