Vans: Off the Wall (50th Anniversary Edition) , livre ebook

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A celebration, chronicle, and must-have for Vans sneakers fans, Vans: Off the Wall offers vivid photography and the compelling story of a casual canvas shoe and a DIY spirit that helped turn pop culture inside out. This updated edition, published to coincide with the brand's 50th anniversary, brings to life the Vans community of boarders, bikers, artists, musicians, and street culture, and the iconic shoes its members love to wear. With oral histories from Tony Alva, Joel Tudor, Steve Caballero, Stacy Peralta, Oliver Peck, and othersas well as two new chapters of original materialVans: Off the Wall provides an intimate, visually stunning account of how the company has changed the face of pop culture since its founding in 1966.
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Publié par

Date de parution

16 mars 2016

Nombre de lectures

0

EAN13

9781613129517

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

12 Mo

CONTENTS
Foreword by Steve Van Doren
Introduction by Doug Palladini
Birth of Icons
Tony Alva
Artists Canvas
Joel Tudor
VTCS
Geoff Rowley
Vans Warped Tour
Custom Made
Combi Pool
Snow Punks
Randy Rarick
Fast Times
John Cardiel
BMX
Band Shoes
Families
Steve Caballero
A Collector s Closet
The Waffle Factory
Vault
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ART AND PHOTO CREDITS
FOREWORD by Steve Van Doren
I grew up knowing what I wanted to do: I wanted to be like my dad. I wanted to make cool shoes and sell them to the kids of America. Now, 50 years later, it s the kids of those kids who are buying the shoes, and it s no longer just America, it s the whole damn world. My father, Paul Van Doren, was a hard act to follow. I never made it to president of our company, but I sure know what Dad wanted for Vans, and I ve tried to carry his feelings and dreams with me over the past 30 years since he retired.
Vans has always been the underdog, the smaller company that scrapped and fought harder. There are no egos involved. The number one thing my dad stressed was that you have to be a people person to succeed. You have to work harder than anyone else. You have to care about what you re doing, love it or leave it-110 percent all the time, every day, and in every way you can. For 50 years I have lived and breathed those expectations, always fighting for the best quality products. Always. My father s vision was to make the best product at a fair price and have superior customer service. Can you imagine that way back in 1965, as he put the plans for Vans in place, Paul Van Doren s vision was to make his own shoes and sell them directly to the public through his own retail stores? Today, branded retail stores are commonplace, even in action-sports, but back then, people thought Dad was nuts. Well, who s nuts now? I m proud that our own stores have come this far and continue to lead the industry.
We ve had many ups and downs over the past four-plus decades. All those stories, good and bad, make us who we are today. Vans is no phony. The company persevered through tough times and continues to reinvent itself without ever losing sight of our roots as skateboarding s first shoe. We ve manufactured shoes in America for 35 years. We survived a Chapter 11 episode that set us back for three years in the 80s. We produced the first signature skate shoe in 1988 and still have that legendary skater, Steve Caballero, on our team. We made a lot of shoes that are widely copied today and a lot of shoes I m glad nobody remembers anymore. We successfully changed from a manufacturing company to a marketing company in the 90s and grew even larger as a result. When my dad sold Vans in 1988, he told new owner George McGown that Vans was a fire hydrant dripping water, that once the rest of the world found out what a great brand Vans was the future business would be enormous. Well, Dad, the fire hydrant is gushing.
A few memories always at the front of my mind:
Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, and skateboarders chose us in the 70s because Vans were affordable, wore longer, and gripped better, and because skaters could feel the board. That coming together was the turning point for us.
Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High helped to get Vans noticed across America and around the world, as he smacked a checkerboard slip-on against his head. Spicoli really embodied Off the Wall.
Vans offering custom-made shoes way ahead of any other shoe company, from the first day my dad opened our doors, then being first to offer shoe customization on the Internet as well. It s always made me happy to see how kids use our shoes to express themselves.
The Vans Warped Tour, getting ready to launch its 15th summer in 2009. Each year, 600,000 kids come to see 80 of their favorite punk bands play for nine hours in 50 cities around the US and Canada for a fair price of $25. Sounds like Vans to me.
Having been able to travel the world many times over, and to do so alongside the greatest core athletes on the planet in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, moto, and BMX.
So, thanks to my dad for bringing our family west from Massachusetts to California in 1964. I m not sure what Vans would look like today if he had stopped in Iowa or Indiana to begin his shoe company there. But he chose Southern California, where the sun shines most days and you can wear casual shoes 365 days a year. Today I m proud to have my sister Cheryl running HR and my only child, Kristy, still working with me, marketing the greatest company in the world.
-Steve Van Doren, VP of Events and Promotions Orange County, CA


Clockwise from left: Steve making it happen at the LA County Fair; Steve with daughter Kristy, age 1; Steve s Porsche and its personalized license plate.
INTRODUCTION
You are holding in your hands a new edition of Vans: Off the Wall , a book that was originally published in 2009. We decided to add two new chapters to the original in honor of the 50th anniversary of Vans. History matters. Legacy counts. And it doesn t mean squat if you re Gen Y or Gen Z, or if you weren t even born when the last Star Wars movie came out. It doesn t matter if you are a digital native or are digitally naive. I remain steadfast in my belief that there is intrinsic quality in things built to last. As Vans celebrates its golden anniversary in 2016, some will say that it s not the last fifty years that matter, but instead what the next fifty years hold. And to that I say bullshit.
If you love Vans for what it is today-and if you don t, someone has stuck you with the wrong book-then you should appreciate the cumulative nature of how we got here. From the very first Style 44 Authentic that Paul Van Doren made, boxed, and sold from out front of the Van Doren Rubber Company factory in Anaheim, California-still our #1 global volume shoe today. From the first time Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta put Vans on their feet and introduced the Dogtown crew to what would become the world s very first skateboarding shoe. From all the evolutionary dead-ends and experiments gone awry that included shoes for bowlers, runners, skydivers, basketball players, break-dancers, baseball players, and even-true story-clowns. From collaborations with Vans extended family members of all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds: punks to photographers, bands to brands, artists to chefs. From Orange County, California, to countries big and small, the world over.
Instead of growing older and slowing us down, I d suggest that our collective memory of Vans first fifty years is exactly what will fuel our propulsion into the future. These are the true stories that no advertising agency can conjure up, the verity that pop culture pundits cannot spin. That collected dust of our history-so reviled by those fixated on the latest, the newest, the most cheaply made, brought to you the fastest-is in fact the very substance giving Vans what cannot be bought, copied, or otherwise appropriated. Because, at the end of the day, we make simple shoes built with canvas and rubber, basic T-shirts spun from cotton, and the like. It s what those products mean that makes the difference-what they mean to those of us who design, manufacture, and market them, and what they mean to you, our Vans family, who affix our personality to your own.
Tens of millions of human beings have amassed and woven a powerful, sincere story of Vans: Off the Wall since 1966, and the rich fabric created by those experiences is something to cherish, something of value no row of zeros can quantify, something for which we are eternally grateful. My favorite pair of Vans is the one worn through in spots, laces streaked with black, waffle sole rubbed smooth at the toes, yet beloved nonetheless; the first pair dragged from the closet floor, day after day. And so goes the brand: fifty years old, imperfect, yet as original and as necessary now as on the day we were born.


Doug Palladini
Steve Van Doren in his element.

IS THE WHOLE REALLY GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS? MAYBE, BUT THESE PARTS ARE WHAT CREATE THE INTERNAL, CHROMOSOMAL CODE OF VANS DNA.

THE SIDESTRIPE
Adidas had their iconic three stripes starting in 68. Nike was new in the early 70s and had its swoosh. Vans needed something to mark our shoes like the other companies did. My dad always doodled, and he kept a pad on his desk. One day he drew the stripe he wanted for our shoes and went to our patent guy, an old cobbler from Boston, and showed it to him. He called it the jazz stripe, and they liked it so he put it on the Old Skool, style 36. That was our first skate shoe that had leather on it, and the first ones came out in 77. The sidestripe is really nothing more than a random doodle, because we needed our own mark on the side of our shoes.

OFF THE WALL
Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva were in our Santa Monica stores back in the mid- 70s, using the phrase off the wall when they talked about how they were riding pools at the time. They were literally turning off the wall, but nobody was going out of the pool and into the air until Tony did it and Skip Engblom called him on it, saying, Man, you just went off the wall. It was just a catchy phrase that stuck. The first little skateboard logo, which we called a turtle, came out with just Off the Wall on it; we added the Vans logo to it later. At that point, only shoes that were for skateboarding got the Off the Wall logo; everything else got the Van Doren logo. The skateboard turtle became the first real symbol in action-sports.

THE WAFFLE SOLE
When my dad left the Randolph Rubber Company, where he had worked for 20 years as a shoe manufacturer, and moved us to California in 1964, he knew that he wanted to be his own shoe manufacturer. There have only been three companies in the world, since 1900, to go into vulcanized manufacturing: US Keds, Converse, and Vans. My uncle Jim, who was an engineer, joined my dad to help bring V

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