Olivetti × Superga

Announced November 14, 1969, at Olivetti's Milan offices, the Valentine 2750 was a red canvas plimsoll made alongside the Valentine portable typewriter, which had gone on sale that spring. Ettore Sottsass and Perry King proposed it as part of the typewriter's launch material, arguing that a machine meant for picnics and bedsits needed something to wear. Superga, forty minutes down the road in Turin, supplied its 2750 last and vulcanising line, and the factory's technical manager Giorgio Ferrero handled the sole.

Sottsass kept the Superga shape almost untouched and changed nearly everything else. The cotton duck upper was dyed to match the Valentine's ABS red, a colour Superga's dyers took four attempts to hit on fabric. The eyelets were replaced with orange nylon grommets matching the typewriter's ribbon spool caps, and the traditional diamond tread was recut as a grid of rounded squares spaced exactly like the Valentine's keys, so a wet footprint reads as a small keyboard.

The oddly specific detail is the insole. Each is printed in black with half of the Italian QZERTY layout: the left shoe carries Q to T and the keys below, the right carries Y to P. Stood together, the wearer is standing on a full typewriter. The shoes shipped in a moulded red plastic tub with a sliding lid and a carrying slot, a direct echo of the Valentine's own case, which Olivetti insisted on despite it costing more than the shoes.

Domus ran a single photograph of a pair resting on a Valentine without comment. Sales in shoe shops were slow, since buyers found the price hard to justify for a plimsoll, but Olivetti showrooms sold out their allocation by Christmas, mostly to people who already owned the typewriter.