In the Winter of 2007 Havaianas Italia asked us to design a stand for the Pitti Immagine fair, one of the most important fashion meetings in Europe, held yearly at the Fortezza d’Abbasso, in Florence. Our idea was of comunicating that Havaianas are not a simple flip flop, an object subdued to the schizophrenic changing of fashion, but a contemporary design project, a timeless idea indipendent from the taste of a period, a contemporary object that deserves to be exhibited in a contemporary art museum, like the Moma of New York.
We designed a stand organized like a room in a museum, where fliflops were set inside some white frames, with descriptions hung on the wall, including the information about materials, year and colors. We choose a gray moquette for the covering of the ground, and the dress for the hostess, the same as the tourist guides of a museum, with a gray tailer and the identity card. We design the welcome desk and two boards for the most precious flip flops.To complete the exhibition, we designed a folding catalogue with the title:
- What is so contemporary?
- This is so contemporary
- Is this so contemporary?
- Yes, Havaianas is so contemporary
We filled the catalogue with a description of the product, of it’s history, the nomenclature of the flip flop in each language of the world and the history of Campina Grande, the city of the Havaianas’s factory. All this knoledge is fundamental to explain that Havaians isn’t a simple flip-flop, but a contemporary object.
© Photos by Giulio Boem
Shown below, the pictures of the stand, with the set, descriptions, frames and board and the hostess that explain the collection to buyers. The sentence “this is so contemporary” is a quote from a performance of the artist Tino Sehgal at the Venice Art Biennale German pavilion in 2005.