Vans

The Van Doren Rubber Company opened its first store at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, California, on March 16, 1966. Paul Van Doren and his brother Jim ran it with Gordon Lee and Serge D'Elia, and the first customers bought the canvas deck shoe now sold as the Authentic. Southern California skaters took to the sticky waffle sole, the Era arrived in 1976 with the Off the Wall line, and in 1977 Style 36 became the first Vans shoe with the sidestripe. That shoe is now the Old Skool, and it anchors our Vans coverage. Vans says Paul Van Doren drew the stripe as a doodle and first called it the jazz stripe, while other accounts credit the in-house designer George Greenwood. The Sk8-Hi came in 1978 and the Slip-On in 1979, and Sean Penn wore checkerboard Slip-Ons as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 1984, recovered and merged with VF Corporation in 2004. Supreme's three-colorway Old Skool in 1996 opened the collaboration era, and Vault by Vans followed in 2003. Jerry Lorenzo's 2017 Fear of God Era also gets a look. Black with a white stripe is still the pair most people picture.