Zellerfeld x Havaianas Top Toe Mule: a flip-flop for every season

For most of its sixty-four years, the Havaianas flip-flop has had a clear season: it goes into the suitcase in June and back into the cupboard by October. This October it arrives in a very different form. The Zellerfeld x Havaianas Top Toe Mule, which debuted at Dover Street Market on 5 October and reached a wider release on 14 October, takes the most familiar sandal in the world and prints it, toe cap and all, as a single piece.

Zellerfeld started in 2016 in a student dorm at Clausthal University of Technology in Germany, where Cornelius Schmitt, then studying industrial engineering, began printing shoes. The company now builds footwear from melted layers of thermoplastic polyurethane and can fit a pair from a smartphone foot scan. Its collaborators have included Louis Vuitton, Heron Preston, Moncler and KidSuper, and a $15 million seed round led by Founders Fund backs Schmitt's belief that a shoe will one day print in minutes rather than the half day a pair takes now.

Havaianas comes from the opposite end of footwear history. Alpargatas launched the brand in Brazil in 1962, drawing on the Japanese zori, and its rubber sole still carries the rice-grain texture that became its signature. The brand went global in 2000 and now sells around 200 million pairs a year, which makes the Top, its classic thong sandal, one of the most widely worn shoes on the planet.

The partnership between Zellerfeld and Havaianas began last year with the Top Toe, a skeletal printed flip-flop presented at Copenhagen Fashion Week and released on 25 September 2025 in six colours at $89, which has since sold out.

The mule is the second chapter, and this time the toe is covered. It keeps the Havaianas toe post, the rice-grain footbed and the Greek-pattern detail on the upper, then closes the front with Zellerfeld's open lattice and leaves cut-outs along the sides so the foot still breathes. The whole shoe comes off the printer as one seamless piece of Zellerfoam, with no stitched or glued parts, and its cushioning is formed during the print rather than added afterwards. It comes in Yellow, Stone, Lilac, Black and Oat, and we have Black, Stone and Oat available at €119.99.

That covered toe matters because it changes when the shoe can be worn, and Havaianas has spent the past year deliberately pushing past summer. Last December it released its first socks, a split-toe design in cotton and glitter versions at €15 a pair, unveiled in a glass igloo in the Italian Alps near Courmayeur under the line "If winter has rules, we haven't read them." Its KidSuper collection, which we stock now, reworks the Top into running and football-inspired silhouettes. Street style has moved the same way, as the toeless and stirrup socks seen on Miu Miu's spring/summer 2025 runway have made an open shoe over a sock look intentional. A mule with a closed front is the natural next step, since it sits comfortably with thick socks, wide trousers and an overcoat, and nobody has to show their toes in November.

For us, the Top Toe Mule is the most convincing case yet that the flip-flop is no longer a seasonal object, because it keeps the Brazilian toe post and the grain under the foot while being printed, shaped and coloured for the colder half of the year. The Zellerfeld x Havaianas Top Toe Mule is available now on noirfonce.eu, and if you enjoy watching a product leave its home turf, read our story on the Nike T90 Shox and what happens when football leaves the pitch.