If Italian supermarket vintage products were shoes
11 Images
by Filippo Piva
View gallery
“My greatest ambition for this project is to be able to show a young and international audience the beauty of the packaging of some historical national products, examples of excellent graphics and design, which may appear diminished in the eyes of many due to their alleged ordinariness.” Speaking is Gianluca Gimini, a young Italian-American designer and lecturer at the University of Ferrara, who presents his new project, Sneakered: a series of curious illustrations in which some of the most famous Italian products from past decades are transformed into shoes. From the unforgettable Cedrata Tassoni to the bitter Cynar, a protagonist of advertising campaigns that have gone down in history.
“The project started in October 2016 -, Gimini explains – after a summer spent reflecting on the theme of sneakers. I was having lunch with a group of friends and we started musing about the historical Pino Silvestre products: so I took a pen and started drawing for fun on the restaurant placemat a sneaker resembling the shower gel packaging. In the evening, at home, I turned the sketch into a graphic render, and I thought of doing the same thing with other famous products.”
So, Vanillina Paneangeli becomes a curious velcro sneaker, with wings incorporated in Adidas style by Jeremy Scott, while the Sapori shoe offers a succulent Panforte midsole. Meanwhile, the mind wanders back to childhood and the period when the products honored in Gimini’s series were part of everyone’s daily life. “Our generation, the millennials, is by definition the generation of n ostalgia -, reflects the designer. – We grew up in prosperity, we experienced consumerism during childhood, we then saw a series of expectations related to career and lifestyles disappointed, and so we sought refuge in nostalgia. But not only that: it seems that even the very young have idealized the ’80s and ’90s, often expressing extremely nostalgic terms about the early Jordans, the Nokia 3310, the Jolly Invicta, early hip hop and so on. Things that they could not possibly have experienced firsthand, but evidently have reached them”.