I Don't Wear My Ballet Shoes for Ballet. I Wear Them to Dance.

Most people hear "ballet shoe" and picture one room. Barre along the wall, mirrors, a pianist in the corner. The shoe belongs to that room and nowhere else.

That has not been true of my training for a long time.

I am not a ballet dancer. I am a dancer.

Growing up I studied a lot of different styles, and every one of them left something behind.

Ballet fine tuned the small muscles. Modern hit the big ones. Jazz gave me tempo. Hip hop and social dancing gave me rhythm. Praise gave me soul. Just to name a few.

Put together, that is my vocabulary, and it is what contemporary means to me. Ballet roots, moving with the flow of everything else I just named. I am not switching personalities when I walk from one class to the next. I am using the same body, trained in more than one direction.

That is also why I do not think of my shoes as ballet shoes. They are the shoes I dance in.

What I actually wear to class

Open a dancewear catalog and you will see a leotard, pink tights, and a bun. Walk into an open class full of working dancers and you will see something else entirely.

On any given day I might be in ball shorts or biker shorts. In a crop top or an oversized shirt. Barefoot, socked up, or in my shoe.

None of that is an accident or a lack of discipline. It is what the work actually calls for. You dress for the floor you are about to be on, the piece you are building, the part of your body you need to see in the mirror that day. The catalog version of a dancer is a nine-year-old at her first recital. It is not the reality for most of us.

Why that makes us a dancewear brand, not a ballet brand

Dancewear is something I am passionate about, and when I went looking for a brand built by dancers for dancers, I could not find the one I wanted.

The market is built around little kids and dance schools. First pairs, recital season, class uniforms. That work matters. It also means the professional and the serious dancer rarely get designed for. Nobody is asking what we actually wear in class once we reach the more mature levels, or what we reach for when we are making the work or catching the step professionally.

That is the gap Jaiyah exists to fill. The ballet shoe is where we started, not what we are. It is why I still wear the shoes myself, in ballet class and everywhere else I dance.

One more thing, and it matters more as you add styles

The more contemporary work you do, the more of your leg and foot is visible. Bare feet, half-soles, cropped leggings, floor work seen from every angle. A shoe that stops the line dead at the ankle is far more obvious there than at a barre shot from the front.

That is the whole reason we make six shades instead of two. A shoe that matches reads as part of the leg. One that does not reads as a shoe. No dancer should have to dye a shoe to look like they belong in it.

Our shoes come in six skin tone shades for adults and kids. If you are not sure which is yours, the shade guide walks through it, and the fit guide covers sizing before you order.

Jaya