Go to any dance store that stocks ballet footwear, and the shelves will be lined with pointe shoes manufactured in other countries: Thailand, Russia, China, the U.K., France and Bosnia and Herzegovina – even if the boxes they come in bear the names of American companies.
Constructed from glue, thin layers of paper and satin, pointe shoes are peculiar, Old-World objects. Their fundamental components haven’t been updated much since 1887, when Salvatore Capezio founded the first commercial pointe shoe brand. An Italian immigrant, Capezio was the shoemaker for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, but as the provenance of most pointe shoes demonstrates, today’s ballet shoes aren’t typically made in the United States.
And that could be bad news for top-tier dance companies and recreational dancers alike as the tariffs proposed by the Trump administration kick in. Compounding recent major cuts to arts funding, the footwear the ballet world relies on could be just one more unanticipated casualty of the current president’s economic policy. Pointe shoes, it turns out, are political objects as much as they are aesthetic.
But ballet companies aren’t necessarily panicking – at least not yet.
A version of this article was first published in the Cascade PBS Politics newsletter. For more politics coverage, subscribe to the biweekly newsletter.
PNB company and student dancers in rehearsal. Dance shoes produced overseas are crucial to ballet, and they could cost much more under the Trump administration’s tariffs. (M. Scott Brauer for Cascade PBS)
Pacific Northwest Ballet, which goes through between 2,000 and 2,100 pairs of pointe shoes a season, orders the shoes almost a year in advance. Their supplier, Freed, is based in the UK, among the countries affected by Trump’s imposition of 10% tariffs (although tariffs on some products have been renegotiated).
According to Gary Tucker, PNB’s director of communications, the company isn’t yet bracing for impact from the new tariffs, or stockpiling pointe shoes, which would be “a futile exercise” anyway, he said, since the shoes need to be ordered so far ahead of time. At Freed, individual makers create the shoes, which are marked with a signature icon denoting the person who made them. Different makers have different delivery times, necessitating that PNB keep anywhere from 50-100 pairs of each style on hand for company dancers.
Though there’s a myth that dancers can wear out a pair of pointe shoes in just one show, the reality is that only certain roles require new shoes for each performance – “We’re mostly talking about the leads in Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty,” said Tucker – and even then, the shoes are usually broken-in before the show and have a post-curtain afterlife in classes and rehearsals. “Most of our dancers keep a rotation of six or more pairs of shoes,” he said.
While the Trump tariffs’ impact on PNB’s international pointe-shoe supply remains to be seen, they’re already disrupting smaller, more innovative ballet shoe businesses like ORZA, operated by former PNB principal dancers Sarah and Seth Orza. Seth Orza came up with the idea for the company after an injury forced him to doctor his traditional flat ballet shoes.
“In 2005, while dancing with New York City Ballet, I suffered a plantar fascia injury that took me offstage,” he said. “After a failed procedure, my doctor told me to try anything I could find — heel cups, running inserts, Dr. Scholl’s — just to stay functional.”
Orza’s DIY solution worked — until one of its components was discontinued. “That moment sparked a conversation with my physical therapist and a major realization: Why am I trying to hack together a solution from products that aren’t made for dancers?” he said. “Why not build the right shoe from the ground up — one that has the support and protection we actually need? In every other performance-based sport — running, basketball, even soccer — footwear has advanced dramatically. But in ballet, we’ve been wearing virtually the same flat for over a hundred years.”
Though a ballerina en pointe is a ubiquitous symbol of ballet, flat ballet shoes like the ones the Orzas design are the true workhorse shoes of classical dance, worn by everyone from 5-year-olds in small neighborhood studios to professional dancers onstage. It took 14 years for Seth Orza to develop the design for his new flat shoe, with improved shock absorption and support. “It’s a response to generations of dancers who’ve accepted pain, injury and burnout as part of the job,” he said.
Though the Orzas live in Seattle, their shoes are produced in Thailand, and the company is already feeling the effects of tariff hikes. They said that their import costs had doubled since the beginning of 2025 due to the new tariffs.
“[W]e’re committed to maintaining the quality of our product while doing everything we can to avoid passing added costs on to our customers,” they said. “So, for now, we are absorbing them, and planning that as our volume increases, these tariffs can be offset by decreased manufacturing and shipping costs. We were dancers ourselves once, and our commitment has always been first and foremost to the dancers.”
