MSCHF’s Flipped Flop, a slide sandal-turned high heel modeled by buzzy celeb interviewer Bobbi Althoff, will inevitably draw comparisons to the Big Red Boot that broke the internet just over a year ago.
But MSCHF’s Chief Creative Officers, Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner, believe that it shouldn’t.
“The core of our process is simply that we design footwear that we think is interesting,” Bentel and Wiesner tells Highsnobiety. “The Big Red Boot was, is, and continues to be one design in MSCHF’s ongoing footwear exploration, which has always been an iterative project for us; we’re going to keep making things that are completely different from each other.”
In other words, take MSCHF’s Flipped Flop as it is.
But what even is it?
Well, on face value, MSCHF’s Flipped Flop is the CatDog of shower slides.
It’s a one piece rubber shoe with a warped rubber sole that curves into itself, fitted with twin “MSCHF Performance Sport” straps, secured with Velcro-like fastener for easy adjustment.
As is typical for MSCHF’s footwear line, the intent was to render a typically quotidian object alien through recontextualization. To make the normal abnormal, if you will. Mission accomplished.
“This kind of kickaround EVA athletic/pool/leisure/shower slide is one of those objects that exists as a symbol in people’s minds,” Bentel and Wiesner explain. “There are hundreds of variants made by every brand you can think of, and they blur together into an archetype that we then use as a building block.”
The Flipped Flop’s appeal is, er, subjective: when I received the shoes in Highsnobiety’s New York office, one coworker said they had “evil energy.” Can’t argue with that. But if the devil works hard, MSCHF works harder, because the Flipped Flop’s fabrication is objectively impressive.
Ample experimentation was necessary to grant the Flipped Flop’s sculptural shape stability, for instance. And the finished product is satisfyingly substantive, a impressively weighty shoe made of quality cushioning foam.
“This one was a doozy,” Bentel and Wiesner continue. “Turns out people don’t really make high heels out of foam! Factories that make 4″ heels tend not to make flip flops, and vice versa. We’re often in a position where we need to figure out pretty novel production processes — MSCHF is a global supply chain power user.”
If you do dare to step out in the Flipped Flop, you’re far more likely to break necks than heels.
The end result lives up to MSCHF’s other invitingly vexing footwear concepts, including its medical boot shoe, reversible sneaker-sandal and, yes, Big Red Boot. Expect to see it on the ATBGE subreddit immediately.
In fact, MSCHF arguably outdid even Balenciaga’s Crocs heels, the original WTF fashion heels. Those were merely Crocs clogs stuck atop a stiletto platform — these are foot-tall shower slides in a shape you’ve never seen before.
You could even argue that the Flipped Flop works even better as an art piece, a symbol of what you could wear rather than what you would wear, though Bentel and Wiesner insist that the Flipped Flop is “pretty comfortable for a heel.”
But is there a market for slides as heels? Despite warming interest in adding unnecessary heels to otherwise normal shoes… no. No, there is not. But that’s why MSCHF makes its mischief.
The puckish provocateurs know that if you build it (and by it, I mean a deliciously crazy shoe destined to ping across the internet), they may very well come. And come they may to MSCHF’s website on July 30 to purchase a pair of Flipped Flops for $450.