Love sneakers? Love history? Want to make it your job? Well, then become a sneaker archivist. Catherine Acosta did just that. She serves as Archivist and Historian at Vans and has been officially piecing together the brand’s history since 2019. She recently helped the brand dig into the past to bring back the Vans Knu Skool, a sneaker that first released in 1998.
The Knu Skool looks just like the name implies. It looks like one of Vans’ original sneakers, but it has been updated for the trends of the late ‘90s. It has a cup sole, a puffy tongue, and a thicker stripe across the upper. It may have come out 25 years ago, but it fits perfectly into today’s design language and trends.
To help bring the sneaker back, Acosta dug through the annals of history. She studied the marketing and release strategy behind the shoe, tracked down original pairs, and helped bring the sneaker back into the 21st century.
“When exactly did the shoe release? How was it released to consumers? How was it marketed? What were the original colorways? And really tracking its overall lifespan within the United States for Vans,” Acosta said.
Her job has allowed her to see all aspects of Vans’ history, from the company making running sneakers, break dancing sneakers, and basketball sneakers, to finding collectors that want to share their old shoes with the brand and building a tangible museum for the product to live in. This is all done in the hope that Vans can use its history to propel its future.
Acosta also knows how difficult it can be to recreate a true retro sneaker. She said, “We try to really use models that are already in existence. And the retro shoes that we do today are definitely not a full-blown reissue of something from the past in that the materials, and, again, the construction is so different today. So it really is looking and taking inspiration from the original design language of the shoe and recreating it today.”
We were able to talk to her about the Knu Skool, but also all things Vans history, and the ups and downs of trying to hunt down sneaker lore.
I want to talk about the Knu Skool, and I know you work in the archive. How did you go through the past to get this new sneaker?
So for the Knu Skool, I did pretty much, like, this full archival investigative report, beginning with looking at our catalog collection in the archive, really just to get a sense of when exactly did the shoe release? How was it released to consumers? How was it marketed? What were the original colorways? And really tracking its overall lifespan within the United States for Vans.
So that was part of the ask. And then the other ask was making sure that our design team had an archival model, and fleshing out this bigger context for it, which also included looking at an original ad for the shoe. And that ad gave a lot of insight to how the Knu Skool, when it was released in 1998, was marketed. And what's a really interesting tidbit is that in 1997, when the Knu Skool was being designed, the Old Skool was celebrating its 20th anniversary.
So in the ‘90s, the Old Skool was already being perceived as this sort of retro skate classic. And so the Knu Skool, the intent really was to reimagine the Old Skool for this new generation. And [it] really took design cues from men's fashion within skateboarding by having a really puffy, really blown-out sort of version of the Old Skool, and really a much more playful one. Also, the construction was completely different. It's a cup sole design, the historic one; it's not a vulcanized silhouette.
So all these things made it not really historically accurate to the Old Skool, but just sort of this retro meta throwback. And then the irony, too, is that you take this to today and it's even more of a meta retro throwback, 20 years later.Then, another key insight in the archive that we were doing as part of this sort of archival investigation was talking to our current design team, where some members had been here in the ‘90s working at Vans when the Knu Skool first came out. And also connecting with the former Vans designer who created it. So getting a lot of key insight from direct sources.
You had said in an interview that when you started doing the archive for Vans,there actually wasn't already one that existed, and you had to create it from scratch. How hard is the ask to go out and find these shoes, rather than just go into a room and pick it out of a drawer?
So I started the archive in 2019 with there not being any formal one, but this sort of baseline of the collection was working with long-term employees who had saved stuff over the years, and starting to evaluate that and use that as sort of the foundation. I'm still in the process of finding a permanent physical home for it at our headquarters. So things live in different places.
And it's a challenge, but it also makes it really fun because there's so much to learn and explore. And one of my things I've championed in doing the archive is really kind of exploring more lesser known stories in Vans history, whether it's through more obscure silhouettes that existed, [or] really looking at the manufacturing that the company did in the early years in the United States, how that really impacted the brand's image in those early years, how that continues to remain with us today, and that influence. So I would say it's fun and exciting, lots of challenges, but I'm four years into it now, so there is definitely some collection base here at our headquarters now. I've come a long way.
How hard is it to recreate a retro, if it's not necessarily something that the brand is already making at the time?
I think it really just depends on what they're looking at. So we try to really use models that are already in existence. And the retro shoes that we do today are definitely not a full-blown reissue of something from the past in that the materials, and, again, the construction is so different today. So it really is looking and taking inspiration from the original design language of the shoe and recreating it today.
And I would also say, too, that the methods of creating these things are much easier today than they are historically. And so it really just depends on what the ask is from the design team, product management.
Do you find certain elements of the shoes come out different because, maybe, the actual manufacturing process of making shoes was different then than it is now?
Well, with vulcanized footwear it's not that radically different. What's different is really the scale and size and industrial production that's happening overseas. But Vans, as institutional knowledge, we have such a keen awareness and understanding of our manufacturing because Vans owned their own factories from 1966 until the mid-1990s.
So we have developers in our product development team that came through that transition of USA manufacturing through Asia, where we manufacture today. So there's a really intrinsic knowledge and understanding across the design team and other parts of the company of really knowing how we make things. It's a part of our DNA.
Do you find a massive difference between when the manufacturing shifted from Made in USA to overseas?
Yeah, I mean for Vans, that transition happened over several years—actually at the time, right before the Knu Skool would've come out. So the kind of big takeaway at that time was that the design language changed completely. Vans hadn't done cup sole stuff in the early ‘80s, but by the mid to late ‘90s, when they were doing stuff like the Knu Skool and a lot of signature skate shoes, that's a whole new method. So they're working with new factories; they have to create new lasts too.
So it's really creating a whole new build from the ground up. And then they are continuing to make what we now call our classics, and the vulcanized footwear still. Again, it's a learning curve. So you see these subtle shifts. New lastsit's new. You have to train new factory workers to make those shoes. So there's a learning curve. And the real key takeaway from when Vans had USA factories was that there was this real emphasis on sort of idiosyncratic details through the handmade process. So you can look at a USA-made shoe and see that things are just not perfect to the standard that we see today in the market.
I feel like when a lot of people look at Vans, when you talk about vulcanized soles, there's a kind of a feeling maybe that it's a uniform design throughout the years, where it's a very similar style of shoe. Doing all this research and building an archive, have you been surprised at things you found that are different than maybe the perception of Vans? That there's a vast history or differences in the catalog?
Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that is often overlooked is just how diverse Vans’ product offering has been throughout the decades. Even in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there's just a variety of silhouettes that were never sort of championed as being iconic of the brand and sort of fell out of production. And even in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, and arguably even 10 years ago in Vans’ product offering, there's always been this sense of innovation and experimentation and going beyond what we reduced it, down to the five icons. At various times in various decades, there's a lot more out there. So it's been really surprising and fun to see that there's other, just much more variety and diversity in silhouettes and stories to be told through the design history of Vans.
What are some of those shoes that over the years you've spotted that maybe slipped through the cracks, that you'd hopefully be able to bring to light someday?
I think one that gets a lot of attention and has been brought back in some ways, or at least taken inspiration from, is in the late ‘70s, beginning around 1978, through the mid-1980s, Vans really expanded their product offering and started cold cure factories and doing cup sole shoes and doing this line called Serio, which was really taking on trying to get a chunk of the market in athletic footwear.
And the product offering was so diverse, and the shoes were specifically designed for running, wrestling, break dancing, skydiving, every sort of variety. And what was cool is that they borrowed the sort of approach that Vans had already really ingrained in the company of you could customize these too. And so we have this rich history of offering sort of athletic footwear, and arguably our vulcanized shoes were designed for specific purposes. We had a high top basketball shoe in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, ‘90s. It just never got as much attention as the shoes that were designed for skateboarding, the Off the Wall shoes.
So there's a lot of little gems like that. And then real novel pieces too… When they were operating their factories in the US, they had military contracts. So we were making military boots, obviously not with Vans branding, for the government. And those are completely different, also more novel, too. And a lot of collectors love this—is clown shoes, and those were made with full-grain, beautiful leather. They have actual Authentics within them, so you can't see, but it's a full big leather shoe. Also, like a Wallabee silhouette.
When you're hunting these things down, is your life an episode of American Pickers, where you're just hitting the road and trying to find it? Or is it a lot of internet research? Or just knowing all the Vans collectors and trying to talk to them and see what they have, or a mixture of all of that?
It's definitely a mixture of all of that. I would say a lot of it's just sort of, obviously, the convenience of going online now and having so many platforms to search through. And I have a few colleagues who help me do that too. And then working with private collectors. Stuff also gets donated to us frequently, and there's so many sort of receptors now through the company, and there being more awareness that the archive and I exist at our HQ.
So I feel like I'm always internally promoting to people, like, "Hey, if you know something…” or, “Send it my way—let me take a peek." And I think with the more public visibility I've garnered in the last few years, that again has brought bigger awareness, where I've had people hit me up on Instagram interested to sell. But there's this sort of catch-22 as well, is that we don't need one of everything. That's an impossible ask.
So the goal of the archival collections is really just to... My guiding star is sort of storytelling, and just to get key pieces that can tell one or multiple stories and is really comprehensive of the whole company, not just the USA-made days, not just the ‘90s, not just skateboarding, but much more comprehensive and really makes this sort of bigger, fuller picture of Vans.
Do you have one trip or experience where you walked into the Vans honey hole, and you feel like you're Indiana Jones? Have you had that moment?
Yeah, I think I've had that moment multiple times. I think it's less so focused on the actual artifact, but more focused on information. So it's like, I met someone who had worked with the production company in the early 1980s who had produced these Vans commercials that are very obscure and very niche, but internally people were very familiar with them. And we had zero documentation about when they came out, who the actor was in it, who produced them.
And I met this woman through volunteer work I do who worked for the company, and she was able to connect me with other people who worked on those commercials. So I got all these oral histories from these people. And then I was able to do that detective work of talking to Steve Van Doren and other long-term people at the brand to paint this fuller picture. And then there was an artifact involved in that the woman had been gifted a pair of early ‘80s Vans shoes from this little brief product franchise called Country Western. She had been gifted that from Jimmy Van Doren, who was leading the company in the early ‘80s, one of the co-founders.
And she gave it back to us at the archive, because, for her, she was like, "I don't have any need for this. And it feels really good to be giving it back to its original home." So that's one of many stories I have of connecting the dots in this fuller way.
Vans being part of VF Corp and the whole big connection to Supreme being part of VF Corp, and Supreme and Vans doing a lot of collaborations through the years—I know that Supreme has gone into the past of Vans and tried to pull out old shoes. Have you worked with them directly at all, trying to pull out old skate shoes or old Vans models?
Not directly, but I know that the people who do manage their account have definitely asked for things for me to give to them to pull inspiration from. And even prior to the archive, I would say that it's not like it was completely absent. There were people at the company who had been stewarding these collections and knowledge of Vans past, so it wasn't completely lost. It's just now it's very formal, and it's really coming under the umbrella of the archive and my work of research and putting everything together.
I know in the past, they had done a project where they did Mike Carroll's Vans shoes and had brought that to light for the first time. When something like that happens, where maybe there's an old skate shoe that's tied to an old pro who's no longer tied to the brand, does that make it more difficult to try to bring those shoes back from the past?
I think it just depends on the relationship that the company has with the former athlete, or with any former person that's worked with the brand. It really is very much based on it, and the sort of unique set of circumstances. So it really just depends. There's so much stuff that was done in the past that I have no documentation of who actually designed it. So I do my best to make really clear and accurate guesses and estimates about things, and the same—that's just the approach. And again, if you have that ability to tap into the person who was involved in the past, who's no longer at the company, that's really great. But really just, it's a case-by-case situation.
Have you ever hit a roadblock where you're so close to hunting something down or tracking something down, and there's just that one hurdle that you can't pass, or that one bit of information that you can't piece together, and it just kind of haunts you? It's like your thorn in the side?
Yeah, and I would say I have many thorns in my side for that very reason of that the company didn't really have a preservation practice or protocol in mind. So much documentation has been lost over time, and so many stories have been lost. And again, it's impossible to know everything. We never really will know absolutely everything, or why something was done this way. And especially, too, because there's so many people from the early years of the company who are no longer around. They've passed on.
And so I think I've just learned to accept that. And when I encounter something where I can't get a clear answer, or sort of historic understanding of [it]—again, I come from an academic museum background, so I really put objectivity and historical accuracy at the forefront to really put that as my approach and not so much... That's when the storytelling piece goes to the backend for me in the archive. And I'm not marketing the piece; this is just for our own institutional knowledge. And knowledge is power, so I try to make it as clear and clean, and be transparent if I don't know something either.
