melissa and modern jelly fashion
The Brazilian brand that effectively invented the category — and the collaborations that built it.
You cannot really write about jelly bags without writing about Melissa. The Brazilian footwear brand has been making translucent PVC shoes since 1979 and has spent the last forty-plus years collaborating with most of the designers who matter. If the wider jelly category exists as a fashion idea — and not just as a material — Melissa is a large part of why.
1979: a fisherman's sandal, translated into plastic
Melissa was launched in 1979 by Grendene, a Brazilian footwear group with factories in Sobral, in the northeastern state of Ceará. The first style was the Aranha — "spider" in Portuguese — a translucent plastic sandal whose woven cage was directly inspired by the leather fisherman sandals worn in Saint-Tropez. The original French versions, sometimes called "Méduses", had been imported into Brazil and worn on beaches in Rio. Grendene's insight was to take the woven shape and execute it in a single translucent polymer.
The polymer is Melflex — a proprietary PVC-based compound engineered by Grendene to be soft, flexible, hypoallergenic, fully recyclable and pleasant to wear in heat. Many Melissa styles also carry a subtle bubblegum scent, added to the compound itself. That smell is part of the brand identity.
Why Melissa matters to the jelly category
Other brands had made plastic shoes before 1979. What Melissa did differently was treat the plastic itself as a fashion proposition, not a budget compromise. The translucent, candy-coloured aesthetic we now associate with the word "jelly" — high gloss, colour-rich, slightly toy-like — is in large part a Melissa aesthetic that filtered out into the rest of the industry.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Melissa was a Brazilian cultural object. The brand commissioned designer collaborations from early on, including with the French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, treating plastic footwear as a serious design canvas rather than a beach throwaway. That decision is what makes the rest of the story possible.
The collaborations — a guided tour
Melissa's collaboration list is unusually long for a footwear brand. Below are some of the partnerships most often cited; the full archive is much larger.
Jean Paul Gaultier
One of Melissa's earliest designer partnerships, with several collections produced from the 1990s onwards. Gaultier's conical, sculptural sensibility translated naturally into moulded plastic, and the partnership is part of why the brand is taken seriously by fashion editors.
Alexandre Herchcovitch
A Brazilian designer who collaborated with Melissa from the early 2000s. The Herchcovitch partnership is often credited with bringing Melissa into a more directional, fashion-led register and laying the groundwork for the international designer roster that followed.
Vivienne Westwood (since 2008)
The Westwood collaboration is the one most casual fans of the brand know by name. It launched in 2008 and has continued, with interruptions, ever since. The most iconic piece is probably the Lady Dragon — a heeled, ankle-strap court shoe with Westwood's orb hardware in moulded plastic. Recurring releases of Lady Dragon, plus heart-toed flats and platform variants, have produced some of the brand's most resold archival styles.
Karl Lagerfeld (2011)
Lagerfeld designed a capsule with Melissa in 2011, including a translucent Lady Dragon variant featuring an oversized bow at the ankle. The collaboration leaned into the toy-like surface quality of the material, with playful candy-coloured palettes that became quickly collectible.
Marc Jacobs
Multiple Marc Jacobs collaborations across the 2010s. These typically translate Jacobs' preppy and playful codes — oversized bows, candy colours, schoolgirl shapes — into the Melflex material. Several have become resale-market favourites.
Comme des Garçons
The CDG collaborations are typically the most conceptual on the roster, with deliberately uncomfortable-looking shapes — heart appliqués, sculptural toe boxes, polka dots, exaggerated bows — that fit CDG's broader interest in object-as-clothing. They are among the most archive-collected.
Jason Wu
A long-running collaboration that has cycled in and out over the years. The Jason Wu styles are typically the most wearable in the collaboration line-up: clean ballet flats, simple Mary-Janes, minimal heels.
Opening Ceremony, Pedro Lourenço and other directional names
Opening Ceremony produced multiple capsules with Melissa during its run. Pedro Lourenço's collaborations brought a younger, minimalist Brazilian-Parisian sensibility. The brand has also worked with Vitorino Campos, Pedro Lemos, Y/Project and several others in the indie-designer register.
Pop-culture partners: Disney, Sanrio, Barbie
Beyond fashion designers, Melissa has run sustained partnerships with Disney (Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Cinderella, multiple princesses), Sanrio (Hello Kitty, My Melody), Barbie, and other licensed franchises. These releases sit slightly outside the directional fashion line and are typically aimed at younger collectors. They are also some of the brand's biggest unit-volume drops.
Galeria Melissa: the concept store as a brand statement
Since 2005 the brand has operated "Galeria Melissa" concept stores — São Paulo first, later New York and London. Each location is designed as an art gallery rotating exhibitions, installations and artist collaborations, with the shoes integrated into the displays rather than racked traditionally. The format is part of how Melissa has built a fashion-cultural credibility that most polymer footwear brands do not have.
Sustainability — the honest version
Melissa shoes are vegan by inception (no animal materials), fully recyclable, and the brand operates a long-running take-back programme that lets old pairs be returned for recycling into new Melflex. The factory in Sobral is one of the largest footwear plants in the world, with publicly reported environmental and social audits.
That said, "vegan" and "recyclable" are not the same as "low-impact". Melflex is a PVC-based polymer, which is energy-intensive to produce. The accurate framing is: Melissa is a meaningfully better plastic footwear option than the industry default, but it is still plastic. The same is true of most jelly bags, including ours.
Why Melissa is having a moment in 2026
The same forces lifting the broader jelly bag category — the Y2K revival, K-pop styling crews adopting translucent accessories as a visual vocabulary, Gen Z preference for vegan materials, the general fatigue with leather's status politics — are pulling Melissa back into the conversation. The brand's deep archive of collaboration drops also gives the trend somewhere to land: when an old Vivienne Westwood Lady Dragon or a CDG-era heart flat resurfaces on resale, it has both nostalgic value and a clear story.
See our parallel guide on K-pop and the jelly bag revival for more on the cultural side of this moment.
Where Firkin World fits in
We are an independent UK brand making a bag, not a shoe. But we sit in the same material family — our PVC line is in the same polymer family as Melflex, and our TPU line is a more durable cousin. The category that Melissa helped create for footwear is now expanding into bags, and brands like ours, among others, are part of that expansion. We are not trying to be Melissa for bags — we make one shape, in 18+ colours, focused on a structured bucket silhouette — but we owe the visual vocabulary partly to what Melissa established four decades ago.
More
For the broader category, see what is a jelly bag. For materials, see TPU vs PVC. For care, see jelly bag care. For the wider competitive landscape, see jelly bag brands in 2026.
Last reviewed: 2026-05-22. Melissa is a registered trademark of Grendene S.A. Other brand names are the trademarks of their respective owners. This article is independent commentary based on publicly available information; no commercial partnership exists between Firkin World and any brand mentioned. Dates and details about collaborations are drawn from publicly reported sources and may not capture the full archive.