Ciao Mao Shoes Offer Many Pairs in One

November 15, 2008. No, they don’t give foot rubs, but Interactive Shoes (“Calçados Interativos” in Portuguese) won a gold Premium Award from this year’s national IDEA/Brasil design award. In this first Brazilian edition of the 30-year-old American prize, Priscila Callegari of Ciao Mao was honored for enabling both men and women to customize their footwear using an eclectic multitude of lasercut, woven and embossed straps, pins and elastics. “In Ciao Mao,” Callegari says, “the customer becomes co-author when she puts together her own pair of shoes and plays with all the available components.” In a workshop above her intimate São Paulo shop, Callegari meticulously hand-crafts the shoes and accessories using heavily researched materials from leathers and textiles to puckered fabric fuxico ‘buttons’ that look Asian but are made in Brazil by traditional artisans. Each pair of shoes looks as proudly diverse as the Brazilians themselves, an aesthetic, and a notion, that Ettore Sottsass certainly would have appreciated. ciaomao.com.br