Vans Old Skool and the Doodle That Became the Sidestripe

On March 16, 1966, the Van Doren Rubber Company opened its first store at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, California. Paul Van Doren and his brother Jim were behind it with Gordon Lee and Serge D'Elia, and the first customers bought canvas deck shoes, the model now sold as the Authentic. The shoe that would make Vans recognizable from across a skatepark was still eleven years away.

Style 36

Vans became a skate company over the following decade. The Era arrived in 1976, designed with the skaters Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, the same year the Off the Wall motto started appearing, and Southern California skaters made the brand their own. The appeal was practical. Vans made sticky, flat-soled canvas shoes that gripped a board, and a skater who wore through a pair could come back and buy another without much damage to a teenage budget.

A year later, in 1977, Vans introduced Style 36. It was the first Vans shoe to carry the sidestripe. The Old Skool name came later, and collectors still use Style 36 as shorthand for the original. Today's version pairs canvas with suede at the toe and around the heel, sitting on the waffle sole that makes every Vans feel the same underfoot.

Where Did the Sidestripe Come From?

Vans' own account is that Paul Van Doren drew it as a random doodle. The company first called it the jazz stripe. Other tellings, including Hypebeast's history of the shoe, credit in-house designer George Greenwood with working the line into the Old Skool and coming up with the jazz stripe nickname. Those versions don't really contradict each other, since a founder's sketch refined by a designer is how plenty of logos happen. Even the year wobbles a little. Some histories date the stripe to 1976, while Vans puts it on Style 36 in 1977. The clean single-doodle version is simply the one the company prefers to tell.

What matters more is what the stripe did. It made Vans legible at a distance. The canvas Authentic looked like a lot of other deck shoes. Anything with the stripe was instantly a Vans, starting with the Sk8-Hi in 1978. The plain Slip-On caught on around the same time, and in 1982 Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli wore checkerboard Slip-Ons in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which did for that shoe what no ad budget could.

Bankruptcy, Supreme and the Vault

The 1980s nearly ended the company. Vans cut prices in 1984 amid heavy competition and a flood of counterfeits and filed for bankruptcy protection. It recovered, sponsored the Warped Tour through the 1990s and kept its skate credibility, and in 2004 it merged with VF Corporation in a deal reported at $396 million.

The Old Skool's fashion second act started with Supreme. In 1996 Brendan Babenzien, then Supreme's design director, introduced a three-colorway Supreme Old Skool, an early chapter of the shop-meets-skate-brand model we cover in our piece on the Supreme drop model. Vault by Vans opened in 2003 as the premium collaboration line. In 2009 it reissued the Old Skool '92 as part of a 20th anniversary pack for Ray Barbee, and the Blends Bones Old Skool followed in 2014. Vans had been letting customers design their own shoes since the late 1960s, and that habit of handing the shoe over to other people runs straight through all of it. The collaborations work because the shoe is a neutral surface. Two panels of suede, a canvas quarter and a stripe give a designer just enough to change without losing the outline.

The Cheapest Classic

The Old Skool's appeal is mostly about restraint. It costs less than most shoes with comparable history, it looks right with workwear and with tailoring, and it wears in rather than out. The waffle sole flexes enough to feel the board, which is why skaters still buy it to skate in. Black with the white stripe is the default for good reason. It hides scuffs, it goes with everything, and it is the pair most people picture when they hear the name. It sits in the same small group as the Converse Chuck Taylor, cheap canvas shoes with a real story behind them.

It also explains Nike's long game in skateboarding. When Nike SB rebuilt the Nike Dunk for skaters in 2002, it was chasing credibility Vans had built over three decades of sessions and shop accounts. The British side of that culture is in our Palace Skateboards history, and the workwear pairing that suits a black Old Skool is in our story on Carhartt WIP.

Vans tells its version of the shoe's history on its Old Skool page, and the Vans Wikipedia page covers the company. Skate shoes and everything they spawned run through our streetwear coverage and the sneakers section.

Wear a pair long enough and the suede at the toe goes grey and rough well before the stripe starts to fade.