Vans Authentic

The Authentic is about as plain as a shoe can be. A low canvas upper is cut in a few pieces and laced through metal eyelets; a band of rubber foxing runs round the sidewall, and the whole is bonded to a flat rubber sole by vulcanising, the shoe baked so that sole and upper become one. Underneath is the waffle tread that gave the shoe its grip. There is no padding at the collar and no stripe on the side; those belong to later Vans.

It was the first shoe the company sold. The Van Doren Rubber Company opened at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim on 16 March 1966, founded by Paul and James Van Doren with two partners, to make shoes and sell them directly to the public. The first style was a lace-up deck shoe, Style 44, close to the Keds of the day but with a thicker sole. On the first morning the shop had display models and almost nothing else, so customers tried on samples, ordered, and came back the next day for shoes made overnight on the premises.

Its later reputation was made by Southern California skateboarders, who by the early 1970s were wearing it for the rugged build and the sole that held a board. The company itself had a rougher time: Chapter 11 protection in 1984, a sale to investors in 1988, the closure of its own factory in Orange in 1995 and, in 2004, absorption into VF Corporation. No source records the deck shoe, by then renamed the Authentic, ever leaving the range.

Vans still sells it in the form it first made, and says plainly that it has not needed a redesign. The canvas is heavy-duty, the eyelets are metal, and the vulcanised build keeps the sole from parting company with the upper. Paul Van Doren, who died in 2021 at ninety, called his memoir Authentic.