Do you know Melissa ? In Brasil there is 2 big brands of traditional outdoor shoes. Havaianas and Melissa. The first one is very well know but the second one? Less.
Melissa is a brazilian brand of shoes created by the company Grendene. One of the pioneers in the use of nylon in Brazil. In 1979, this company had the brilliant idea of launching a pair of beach plastic shoes called Spider shoes under the brand Melissa: Sandalias Aranha. This shoe model was inspired by french Divers shoes. It is called “Spider” because of its shape. But in Brazil everybody knows it by the name “Melissa”.
This brand is one of the first brazilian examples of TV Merchandising because they introduced the spider shoe in several brazilian TV soaps beginning of the 80’s. The brand had a continuos growth until the first half of the 90′. It is definitely the symbol of Design popularization. Only in 2000, Melissa was re-discovered
by fashionistas and became fashionable again. People like the Campana brothers or recently Zaha Hadid and Vivienne Westwood.
Since then, you can be sure that each spring-summer fashion week has its number of Melissas. Amazing. Of course, the brand developped new collections, always being loyal to plastic and EVA. Very recently, they even made an audacious campaign with Dita von Teese. It is quite hard to believe that these campaigns is for shoes. We can see the impact of the brand and the fashionable dimension of it. Here some of my preferred photos I found in the FrouFroufashionista blog. Of course because they got Diva Dita it makes a huge difference. She could bring glamour to an insurance company!!! The big question today is about plastic. Should Melissa give up on plastic and use exclusively natural EVA? Difficult to do this because natural EVA is not enough solid to get ou a shoe out of it. So the future will tell.
LA
