"I am not really a creative director,” Melissa shoes’ Edson Matsuo said last night, as Kate Moss glided by, making a beeline for Gareth Pugh. “I like to think of myself as more of a creative activist. My job is to connect people through a free flow of ideas, and I am trying to do that with shoes.” Given the wild turnout at the launch of Galeria Melissa in Covent Garden (the Brazilian shoe giant’s third flagship after São Paulo and New York), it looks like Matsuo may be on to something. Top models, footballers, boy bands, cross-dressers, reality-show stars, and assorted groupies crowded into the new store.
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“We want to engage people and are always thinking of ways how,” Matsuo continued. “So we came up with an idea of a nine-shoe collection in different colors and sizes, where you can mix and match them all up to 81 combinations. We even sell the shoe individually because a lot of people, especially in Brazil, can’t afford two shoes, so they buy one and mix and match them with their friends. It turns into sort of a game, like, I guess, trading baseball cards. We love that kind of interaction.” Matsuo’s ideas don’t end there: “We’ve also created what we think is the first ‘uni-shoe.’ No right and no left, you can wear each on whichever foot you like. It makes getting dressed easier in the morning.”
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While Matsuo was talking business, Jamie Hince was on the decks and his wife, Kate Moss; Georgia May Jagger; Jaime Winstone; Judy Blame; and Richard Mortimer (who advised us to check out East London’s “Sink the Pink” club night) were going mental on the dance floor. But back to shoes: How has this little brand from Brazil managed to sell millions of candy-color scented plastic shoes—and how exactly has it attracted the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Zaha Hadid, and Vivienne Westwood as collaborators? Says brand director Paulo Pedó: “Plastic is one of the coolest substances to work with—much more so than leather. For a designer, it’s a dream and a challenge to work with something like that. And we discovered over the years that designers do like to take on a good challenge.”
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