Interview: Steve Caballero Tells the Story of the Vans Half Cab

Image via Complex Original

The thing about skate shoes is this: they're ephemeral. The shoes themselves go from box-fresh to powerline fodder in less than a month, and models seem to come and go just as quickly. So when a skate model hits its 20th birthday still going strong, that's something.

The Vans Half Cab turns 20 this year, and its namesake, original Bones Brigade member Steve Caballero is still going strong as well. The 47-year-old Cab was on the cover of The Skateboard Mag back in September skating his signature kicks, and he blessed Complex with an interview to discuss the birth of the midcut skate shoe as well as a very special Supreme collabo.

So start at the beginning — how did the first Caballero come about?

Actually, I got sponsored by Vans in 1988, early ’88. At that time, in between 1985 to about ’87, we were wearing shoes other than Vans, just because Vans wasn’t really supporting skateboarding at that time. They were kind of more focused on BMX and breakdancing. So we ventured out, tried other shoes. I rode Converse for a while, I rode Nike Air Jordans, Puma Prowlers [see above]. I even tried the first Airwalks when Airwalk started in ’87. And then I think Vans just got a boost about wanting to get back in the sport and support skateboarding, so they — I’d never been paid from a shoe company before. So they approached me and said, hey, we want you to ride for Vans and we want to pay you. I’m like, well, that’s something new. Sure! They told me how much they wanted to pay me, and I said sure, that’s cool, and they said ‘we also want to give you a signature shoe as well.’ Once I got wind of that I started jotting some stuff down on paper, kind of basing it off the 138 I used to wear all the time and adding my own flavor to it. I brought some drawings in, and they showed me something they were working on as well – it had some aspects that were similar to what my drawing was, so I kind of went with what they had presented me. They made a couple changes. They said they wanted to add some texture that made it look like a dragon, some reptile texture to the side, they had come up with a logo that was a dragon with the tail shaped like a C and my name across, kind of something to tie in with my old board graphics. And we just went with that, because we picked the black and grey and they did a few more colors after that, one was red and grey, and then at the end a purple and grey as well.

And later skaters started cutting them down?

I don’t know when the first time I saw someone who had cut them down, but I know it was a trend going around — this was when vert skating was kind of dying, street skating was kind of coming up, and people were wearing my shoe because that was the only signature shoe on the market. That shoe came out in 1989, but the Half Cab wasn’t released until three years later. A lot of the street skaters were wearing the original shoe, and I guess they wanted a lower feel to the shoe, so they started cutting the shoe in half, and putting duct tape around it, and stickers. And then I saw that and started doing it myself. I think a couple pairs I tried to sew like that. Then eventually I got tired and I was like instead of cutting these things down, why don’t we make them like this? So I brought the idea to Vans, and I said hey, you know, I see a trend going on with the shoe — the shoe’s been out for three years already, why don’t we come up with a new shoe and call it the Half Cab and cut it down and come up with new colors? They liked that idea, so I told them I wanted come up with a new logo for the side, so I grabbed a picture of me doing a half Cab and they made a silhouette of it and put “Half Cab” on the side and that’s how the label came about. It just went from there. That’s how that evolved.

I’m pretty sure the high top was still around. And what was cool how that all flowed together was that the “half Cab” was a skateboard trick as well, so it just kind of flowed — like, if we do this, we should just call it Half Cab.

Did you ever think back then that the shoe would have this kind of longevity?

It just blows my mind — we never even expected that the shoe would get popular again. Because it’s always been in the line, but kind of underground and always in the catalogs as a classic. And I’ve had tons of other different designs and shoes promoted after the Half Cab — I probably had six or seven shoes after the Half Cab. So when that kind of ran it’s course, they started pumping the Half Cab again: limited editions, collaborations. They made this line called the Vault line that went in high-end stores, and the Half Cab was in there. And when they did that they started doing collaborations with respected artists. And once that happened and kind of gave a little buzz to it again and they started releasing the shoe on the broader skate market as well with different colorways, and it kind of took off. And then all of a sudden you see all these shoe companies start copying it. And it just blew me away even more when eventually DC copied it. And like, they copied it to the T. I have a lot of respect for DC because of their image and the skaters they’ve had and just their whole program — it’s a cool program. For them to copy the Half Cab, that was the most flattering thing that could ever happen to the shoe. When I saw that, I was like, that’s pretty cool. They’re paying homage. People would always ask me, ‘are you bummed that all these shoe companies are copying your shoe?” I’m like, “no, not at all! I’m stoked. To me, that’s flattering.”

Even Vans has copied it [laughs] in its own line. I’m like, wait a minute here, all right guys. It’s cool when other companies copy it, but come on, you guys can think up another design, right? Let me have this one.

Did you have to rediscover it yourself?

Yah, you know when Vans went to a cupsole I actually stopped wearing the Half Cab because the cupsole was so much more comfortable. So all this time the Half Cab when it first came out was just a vulcanized shoe with no removable insole. So when I went back to start wearing it, it hurt my feet! I was just like, man — I’m a lot older now, my arches are not as strong, I can’t wear these vulcanized shoes, there’s not enough padding there for what I’m doing. So when they revamped the Half Cab again, called the Half Cab Pro, and put an insole in there, I tried it out [and] I was like, oh, this is comfy. Now I can wear these again. And I’ve been rockin’ ‘em since. So I’m actually stoked that they redesigned it and redesigned the last and put a removable insole in it and it’s just rad how they kept doing the collaborations and they’ve done limited editions – that’s what kind of built the hype of it.

I would see people who rode for other companies, and I would see pictures of them wearing my shoe. “They’re gonna get in trouble,” you know? And it’s rad. Even skaters on Vans that have their own shoe, I’ve seen photos of them wearing Half Cabs, too.

Talk a little bit about the Supreme limited version of the OG, DIY cut-down “half Cab.”

Yeah, it’s really cool actually when they thought of the idea. I didn’t realize it was going to be that limited, though — that’s really, really limited. I thought I was gonna be — they said you’re gonna cut all these shoes, and I was thinking they were gonna do 100 to 500 of them, I was like, “I could do that many shoes.” Then I heard they’re only doing 20, I’m like, OK, that’s easy enough. Even if they came out with 500, I would cut 500 of them.

Did you hang onto any of your old ones?

Yeah, I have a bunch of ‘em up in my attic still in the box. I have a couple originals of the Caballeros, and a couple originals of the Half Cabs. [The ones I skate] are pretty much thrashed, you know. I pretty much throw them away — though I’ve given a lot of them recently to Vans because they’re setting up displays at the stores of some of the shoes that we’ve been in and put up our boards to shoe these are the actual shoes I wore.

How many pairs do you think you’ve gone through over the years?

Oh man, I don’t know. A lot. Over the years, a lot. It wasn’t until recently that I started wearing [the Half Cab] again, over maybe the last 10 years? Six years maybe? Since I started wearing it all the time. Because I had other shoe models that I would wear.

It’s funny — guys seem to switch sponsors a lot in skateboarding, but you’ve been tremendously loyal.

Been with Vans since ’88. Powell since ’79. I probably would have been with Vans longer, but when we wore Vans back in the early ‘80s we weren’t getting paid by them. And when they stopped giving us shoes altogether, we started wearing other shoes. It just wasn’t something they did back then. I think they were just in a place where they weren’t sponsoring skaters monetarily like that. They would give shoes away, but they wouldn’t actually pay people to ride them. Apparently it got to where they saw that nobody was wearing the shoes — no one that was in the magazines. We were wearing Air Jordans and Pumas and Chuck Taylors. I think Vans wanted to get some coverage, so I think that’s when they approached me and said ‘hey, we want to pay you to wear our shoes.’