Vans is back.
This spring and summer the internet’s best trend sleuths claimed Vans as “2024’s ‘It’ shoe,” serving up an assortment of hot and vile takes on the matter. I’ve read the posts and they are nothing short of violence.
Some called Vans “nostalgic.” Are they casting back to Spicoli’s carefree early ’80s? Or, like, three years ago when everyone was wearing Vans all the time? One big-brained writer called them a “once-forgotten sneaker.” Huh? Vans is a multibillion-dollar global business. We can’t let TikTok ruin our brains like this. And the worst takes of all, several of them, conjured the ugliest millennial-coded phrase I can think of, declaring that, thanks to Vans, we are having a “sk8er boi summer.”
All of this because a handful of celebrities were caught walking around in Vans at some point in the first half of 2024—Emily Ratajkowski, Gigi Hadid, Jennifer Lawrence, and Zoë Kravitz among them. And they all looked great, they really did.
But just reading the words Vans sneaker trend makes me feel like I’m living in an alternate reality, where the collective human memory cycle has been reduced to that of a goldfish. Vans had undoubtedly cooled off over the last few years. But since when is an entire brand a trend?
More importantly: Is Vans really back? Most of the takes thus far have come from women’s fashion publications, so I would like to be the first men’s style writer to say that, yes, Vans is back.
Obviously sneakers are part of the same trend cycles that drive all of fashion. Particularly in menswear: Sometimes sneakers lead the cycles, sometimes clothes do. Vans makes all kinds of sneakers these days, but the brand is best known for simple, low-profile, vulcanized soled shoes. So when everyone starts wearing metallic ’90s running shoes or Sambas (like Vans but different), Vans is going to take a hit. That’s exactly what happened. Vans burned very hot for about a decade, through the skinny-jeans hipster era and well into the the #menswear renaissance of the ’10s. Then things got wonky. Designer fashion exploded for men, all sorts of conventions about shapes and silhouettes were upended, and the whole sneaker-sphere was rearranged. Vans didn’t fare too well. It was the sneaker brand that defined an era of sensible, modest, stylish dressing. No one wanted any of that anymore.
So what happened? Why has this nostalgic, long-forgotten, sk8er-boi brand returned? Did TikTok and the so-called indie sleaze revival bring Vans back from a dangerous precipice? One that led to the hiring of a new CEO to help “resuscitate” the brand, which even The Wall Street Journal affirmed had “lost its cool”? Vans has certainly made its own concerted effort to reinsert itself into the zeitgeist, with splashy activations this year during fashion weeks in Paris and New York. But I think there’s an even more simple and obvious explanation: When something goes away for a while you start to miss it. Vans sneakers never stopped looking cool and feeling good to wear, they just needed a break. They became too familiar. People began to crave things that were essentially the opposite of Vans—like Hoka running shoes or hard-bottomed loafers. Meanwhile, Vans kept being Vans.
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