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Dunlop Green Flash trainers still sold with green laces as well as the normal white

A Vietnamese trainer with an unusual style & brand history, the retro Green Flash Trainer used to be the universal choice of middle class families who called it a "tennis shoe" and mums who bought it at Woolworth's before sending their children to school. Its roots go back to the mid nineteenth century, when John Boyd Dunlop's Liverpool Rubber Company patented a way of sticking rubber to canvas. If anyone is good at reading old patents, please let me know what this technique was Dunlop was a former vet who's first business idea was to market sheep gut as a pneumatic tyre, but soon decided that vegan materials were better. By the 1930s the company patents were running out and Green Flash became one of the first attempts to differentiate a trainer by advertising and endorsement by Fred Perry, the Wimbledon-winning tennis player. His company survived on a large scale till the 1970s after which the brand name has been bought and sold for different products such as these shoes, sports equipment, and even Dunlop microfibre slippers made in Spain and sold on the slippers page. Still sold in smaller shoe shops, the shoes were re-launched as a retro fashion brand with the help of an add-agency:

"In order to breathe life into the brand we took on a completely new position in the youth market and positioned the product as a "club" brand. With the targeted use of guerrilla & tactical marketing we were able to place the product in front of the aspirational club audiences and establish the brand as a "must have". Night projection, fly-posting, club DJ sponsorship, cutting edge Point of Sale and viral marketing campaigns formed the core of this highly successful 3 year break"

Aspirational may not be quite the right word The charm of Dunlop trainers - like Converse in the USA or No Sweat - is that they are not trying to be something else; they are cool because they are uncool. They request that the wearer should be judged in some other way than price, polish, or recentness of the shoe design. Since re-launch another company has bought the brand and put strange green slip-streams round the lettering, perhaps to suggest supersonic speed. And embroidered a Wimbledon pavilion above the laces, with dragon-like banners either side.

Demonstration slides (suit broadband connections):

1 ironing the laces
2 protecting your green flash in the loo
3 looking after your shoes at night
4 protecting your green flash in the kitchen

British-made laces in other colours than white or green are available from shoestringukcouk - (ukcouk ending) and any 90cm-100cm lace will fit

Made in

Vietnam - Amnesty - Human Rights Watch - The Hub - EthicalTrade.org#V
VietnamHumanRights.net - Report on clothing and footwear in Vietnam

<<Other canvas shoes from countries with more human rights - France, Indonesia & Portugal

UK          2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10    11    12
EU          34   35.5 36.7 38   39   40.5 42   43   44.2  45.5  47  
US male     3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10   11    12    13
US female   3½   4½   5½   6½   7½   8½   9½   10½  11½   12½   13½