Vans Women's Fashion Brand

Vans is a leading footwear brand and does an excellent job with youthful fashion as well - the two-part identity this page profiles: a shoe company first, and a youth-fashion name built on top of the shoes. The story goes back to the 1960s and has continued to develop year after year with interesting new trends, in its summary, and the dated record that follows is one of the fullest founding histories in this letter.

In 1966, brothers Paul Van Doren and Jim Van Doren, along with partners Gordon Lee and Serge Delia, opened for business at 704 E. Broadway in Anaheim, California, on March 16. The Van Doren Rubber Company is unique in that it manufactures shoes on premises and sells them directly to the public - a factory and a shop in one room, which is why the company could build a shoe to a skater's complaint and sell it across the same counter. The name House of Vans was coined in that founding period, before the skaters arrived.

Skateboarders, the Era and the Old Skool

In the early 70s, skateboarders who liked Vans' rugged make-up and sticky sole were seen sporting the shoes for the first time, showcased on the windows of the Anaheim location - the moment the work shoe became the skate shoe, adopted rather than marketed. In 1976, the Vans #95, now known as the Era, with a padded collar and different color combinations, was designed by Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta and became the shoe of choice for a generation of skateboarders; also in 1976, the Vans 'off the wall' logo made its debut.

The second named classic followed in the same record. Vans #36, the Old Skool, debuted with the now famous Vans Sidestripe; the Old Skool is Vans' first skate shoe that incorporated leather panels for increased durability. What started as a random doodle by Paul Van Doren was originally referred to as the 'jazz stripe' and has become the unmistakable hallmark of the Vans brand. For a women's shopper, those two models are the vocabulary of the whole range: Era for the padded-collar original in colour combinations, Old Skool for the leather-panelled shoe with the stripe - and every later Vans style is a variation on one of those two 1970s answers to a skateboard.

Researching the Women's Range

The brand's own site, carried in this page's References, has its women's clothing and shoe range. The profile's carried links place Vans among the women's fashion brand pages, the clothing store and wholesale directories, womenswear buyers and women's fashion news - and its two photos, of the women's clothing and shoes and of the women's shoes and fashion, are in this page's gallery. Among the V brands, Vans is the letter's skate original: Volcom built a boardsports clothing company a generation later, and Von Dutch sold the celebrity end of the same California youth culture, but the 1966 Anaheim shop is where this letter's street story starts.

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