Havaianas Tradicional

The Havaianas Tradicional is a sandal reduced to almost nothing: a flat slab of rubber with a footbed laid over a base of a different colour and a Y-shaped rubber thong strap. Turn it over and the base carries a brick-like tread; look down at the footbed and it is stippled with tiny raised ovals. Those are grains of rice, borrowed from the woven straw of the Japanese zori on which the whole thing was modelled.

It was launched in Brazil in 1962 by Alpargatas, a footwear company that had made its name with cheap canvas alpargatas. The first pairs were white on top and blue underneath, with blue straps, and nothing else was offered. The name, meaning 'Hawaiians', borrowed the glamour of the islands where rubber flip-flops had caught on. They were cheap, they did not smell, and the straps did not come out, which became the selling line. Salesmen drove them round the country in Volkswagen vans.

For thirty years the Tradi was working footwear, so ordinary that, the company says, in the 1980s the government put it on the list of basic goods whose price it controlled, beside rice and beans. Colour arrived by accident, the company says, when a machine fault in 1969 turned out a batch with green straps that sold at once. The fashion story came much later and belongs largely to other models: the single-colour Top of 1994, the flag-strapped Brasil, the runway appearances.

Through all of it the Tradi stayed in the range, and the company still calls it the model that started everything. Alpargatas now sells some two hundred million pairs of Havaianas a year, and the business has changed owners without the sandal changing much at all. Imitations are everywhere, which is why the brand's best-known slogan, first used in 1969, 'as legítimas', the genuine ones, still has work to do.