Are Mules in Style for Fall 2026? The Brands Selling Them Buried a Note About October

On August 11, Who What Wear named the five trends “the most stylish people” will be wearing come fall, and mules led the list. Shopping editor Chinazor Offor calls the moment “a big resurgence,” concedes in the same paragraph that “mules aren’t new,” and lines up seven pairs to shop, from a $109 Steve Madden to a $1,200 Saint Laurent loafer mule. A coronation, in other words. For the season of dropping temperatures, the anointed shoe is the one category defined by a missing part.

The search bar shows who’s hesitating. “Are mules in style fall 2026” autocompletes word for word, so the demand is real. So does “can you wear mules in the fall,” and “in the winter,” and “can you wear mules with socks,” and my favorite, “are mules hard to walk in,” which is an engineering question in a trend costume. The coverage doesn’t touch any of them, the same gap satin ballet flats fell into when this season’s lists aimed a stain-prone slipper at October, and it sent me to the winter-mule literature, which turns out to be written almost entirely by people with mules in stock.

Can you wear mules in the fall?

Mule sellers say yes with conditions attached, and the conditions are the story. Charles & Keith’s mule guide works through the workarounds, woolen socks, shearling, closed toes, then lands on a sentence I’d like framed: “On the harshest winter days, it’s often safer (and wiser) to reach for sensible heavy-duty boots.” That’s a mule seller talking. beek, a footwear brand that makes shearling mules, opened January 2024 with a winter-mules post admitting the obvious up front, “mules won’t keep them dry in a downpour,” before recommending closed toes, shearling linings, and “a chunky or lug sole” for traction.

Who’s talking	The admission	The prescribed fix
Charles & Keith, mule styling guide	Harshest days call for “sensible heavy-duty boots”	Shearling materials, woolen socks or tights
beek, “How to Wear Mules in Winter,” Jan 2024	“Mules won’t keep them dry in a downpour”	Closed toes, shearling linings, chunky lug soles

Now add the prescription up. A closed toe plus a shearling lining plus a treaded sole plus a wool sock produces a covered, lined, warm slip-on. You know this shoe. It’s a clog, or a house slipper, or the loafers already sitting in your closet. Each fix bolts back on something the mule left out, except the one thing nobody can reinstall without ending the exercise: the open back. And the open back is the trend.

Are mules hard to walk in?

i-D dated the problem at two thousand years. Writing up the last big mule wave in March 2017, the season the style clopped down runways at Jacquemus and Eckhaus Latta, staff writer Alice Newell-Hanson put it flatly: “If the main function of a shoe is to cover your foot and comfort your step, the mule has existentially failed for almost two millennia.” Her history cites the 1786 memoir of Count de Vaublanc, who recalled mules grown so high that women used canes to walk. The pair below, silk over leather, was made in the 1770s and is held by LACMA, and you can tell at a glance that its owner wasn’t hurrying anywhere. So the query has prior filings, roughly 240 years of them.

None of this makes mules bad shoes, just August ones, and the crown itself is a rerun: Marie Claire was calling mules “fashion’s easiest fall shoe” back in October 2024, with a shopping list running $105 to $1,290, and the category gets rediscovered roughly whenever a fall list needs a low-effort pick. Do you already own a pair? Then your move costs nothing. Wear them now, while the sidewalks are warm, and let the $12 sock trick carry you through October. What I’d skip is buying the “winterized” version, the closed-toe shearling number, because that object exists in your closet under a different name. And for the days when it genuinely matters, the people selling mules have already put their answer in writing. Boots.