Jelly Shoes
Translucent plastic sandals in candy colors, often with glitter suspended inside like a treat you could wear. Jellies squeaked, pinched, and blistered every summer foot in America — and everybody just kept wearing them, because they were cheap and they sparkled.
The jelly shoe is a fisherman's shoe that got a makeover. French company Sarraizienne claims it made the first PVC shoe back in the 1950s — a cheap, easy-to-clean item worn by shrimp fishermen and appreciated by nobody else. In 1980 a Paris company named, fittingly, Jelly Shoes had the idea of transforming that homely utility shoe into something fun: they dyed batches in bright colors and sold them at several times the supermarket price as urban fashion. It worked — jellies hit French magazines and Paris fashion shows, the company partnered with Brazilian manufacturer Grendene in 1982, and by 1983 Bloomingdale's was ordering 2,400 pairs for American shoppers.
The original company stopped operating in 1986, but by then the jelly shoe had escaped into the wild — and in the US it settled into the niche where a generation actually remembers it: the bin of cheap, glittery kids' sandals at the drugstore, the shoe-rack impulse buy, the default summer shoe of the 90s girl. The formula never changed: PVC molded into a woven-look sandal, translucent as sea glass, frequently with glitter mixed right into the plastic. Neither did the experience — the squeak of wet plastic, the sand trapped under the footbed, the raw spot forming behind each heel by mid-July, and the total unwillingness to take them off anyway.
The style has been revived over and over since the late 1990s, cycling back through fashion in waves — each one greeted by grown 90s kids with the same two reactions: pure delight, and a phantom ache across the top of the foot.
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