Here’s all my pick-ups from 2008, in roughly chronological order…

Vans Syndicate 005 x W)Taps Chukka (Fall 07). A must-have ebay purchase from January.

New Balance 576. I got these Barbour-jacket themed Made in England 576s for half price. They are the most comfortable shoes I bought all year. I wore them to work every day and need to re-up so bad!

Supreme x Bad Brains x Vans Sk8-Hi. Friend copped these for me from the store when she went on holiday to NYC. First time I have not paid reseller prices for Supremes! They are the wrong size though and I might sell them this year. Only worn twice.

Supreme x Vans Half Cab. Color pack, Diamond Blue. I wanted the yellows of these but was in Greece on holiday when they dropped, so I missed the ebay moment and had to settle for blue. They’ve got a lot of wear – but the blue has stained the white laces so they really need a wash.

New Balance 574, made in Japan. Work shoes – also half price, also seen a lot of wear this year.

Vans Syndicate 009 x W)Taps Bash. The first shoe from the best pack of the year.

Vans Chukka Low (Chris Pfanner). Love these but they are a half size too small and I may have to let them go…

Vans Syndicate 008 x W)Taps Greaserz. Amazing shoe from the year’s best collaboration.

Classickicks x Vans Era. This collab between NYC store Classickicks of four different Era colourways and two Sk8-mids didn’t get as much love as it should have. Would have helped if the insoles were LX rather than standard I guess, as they are not as comfortable as Syndicates, and I’ve not worn them as much as I thought I would.

Vans Syndicate 008 x W)Taps Rudeez. See my earlier post waxing lyrical about W)Taps x Vans this year. The worst thing about this pack was that Syndicates no longer come in US8.5/UK7.5, so I sized up, and none of them fit me very well… as a result I don’t wear them as much as I’d like.

Nike Air Jordan III – Countdown Pack. Paid retail (ie a fortune) for these, which I was forced to buy in a pack with the Jordan 20s. The 20s are still in the box and have not seen the light of day! Hideous things. Anyone want a pair? I love my IIIs even though they are not OG. I have worn them pretty much non-stop. My first pair of Jordans – ever.

New Balance 420. TK Maxx, Birmingham – £16.99! My best TK Maxx find ever… these had not even dropped at Size? yet when I got them.

Nike Blazer SB Elite – Lance Mountain. My pre-Christmas present to myself… first pair of SBs in a couple of years. Love them!

Now come the Christmas presents…. I was very spoilt this year…

Supreme x Vans Half Cab. One of my grails. So pleased to open these up on Christmas Day!

Masters of the Universe-themed 576 pack from Offspring, made in England. Love these so much – the colourway is Skeletor-inspired!

Also want the He-Man ones..

My first pair of Converse. Have never been able to bring myself to buy any as they are so played out over here. But it is just a classic shoe and I need to own it!

Now for my Christmas presents to myself…..

Vans x Proper Authentic LX one-piece – wore these on New Year’s Eve… Decided to cop only the Authentics from this fantastic pack due to lack of funds…. still think the og Authentic (w/ seams) is a better design though…

Vans x Dave’s Quality Meat Chukka (3 Feet High & Rising pack)
Another one chalked off the grail list…. ebay.. think they are 2nd gen but whatever… I love them!

And that my friends is 2008, my year in trainers….. excluding the Jordan 20s which don’t really count, I make that… 18 pairs!

Edited to add: I forgot a pair of white checkered Supreme Half Cabs (#1 grail) that I got for my birthday in May but I seem to have mislaid when I was taking photos…. 19 pairs!

I would buy these for me and all my friends. But they cost 189 euros. For slippers.

Available from The Glade.

(Sorry for the pic quality, my camera was running out of batteries.)

Even though I was supposed to stop buying SBs last year, I had to break my self-imposed ban for these. The leather upper is top spec aged leather, which I tried to capture in the first photo, and the P-Rod-inspired quilted lining is really special, although ideally it should go all the way through the shoe, not just the top inch of the ankle! Super comfy too, thanks to the Zoom Air insole, which is what makes the SB Blazer beat its OG counterpart.

I’ve decided to pass on the latest Supreme Vans that dropped yesterday. There’s just too much good stuff coming out to mess around with something that I am not fiending over.

This year they have really laid down the gauntlet to W)Taps and Supreme with a new range of four shoes for Vans. Pics are all over the internet – check the Sneaker Freaker interview which broke the news – so here’s just one to refresh your memory.

I love a themed pack and here we have one of my favourite themes of all – nautical. Each of the six shoes in the pack is decked out with cute flags and all three of the models work perfectly in some kind of yachting context. If you know the label Pegleg NYC – I reckon these shoes were made to go with their Vampire Weekend/yacht club/golf geek range of t-shirts from the last couple of years.

By far the most popular, even before they have dropped, seems to be the hybrid of the Chukka with the Zapato Del Barco. I for one am getting a little bored of the deck shoe craze, so am looking forward to this being the last of these kinds of shoes, but I can see how it works and why all the fellas love it so much.

My favourite has to be the Native American. This is originally a lesser known sk8-hi/Chuck-style hi-top. Proper have stripped it down into a one piece and laid on a subtle checkerboard heel piece. The colours, sweatshirt grey and bright blue, are very summery indeed.

The one I’m not sure about is the Authentic. They’ve turned it into a one-piece also, and it’s now seamless with none of the white contrast stitching that makes the Vans authentic a design classic,*the* iconic deck shoe. I’m so in love with authentics generally that it’s taking me some time to get used to this seamless one-piece version. But I imagine I’ll get there.

Until recently, the basement of Slam City Skates used to house the legendary Rough Trade record shop. I used to make a pilgrimage to this shop as a teenager. It’s so legendary that I can remember the last record I bought from Rough Trade before it moved east to Brick Lane. In 2003 I saw an amazing in-store gig in this tiny room by The Gossip. With all the racks of records only about 10 people could fit in the store at any one time – about 60 were crammed in for The Gossip. Anyway, Rough Trade upped and moved to Brick Lane last year after twenty odd years in Covent Garden, and the basement has given Slam City some room to spread out in. 300-odd people were supposed to be attending this launch according to the Facebook event so I snuck in early and took some photos before the hordes descended.

The Rudeez/Rudies were missing from the display.

The Gabe Morfords are the only shoes from this range yet to drop.

It was tradition for bands who played or hung out in Rough Trade to write on the ceiling – thankfully they haven’t painted over it.

This year however, the W)Taps x Syndicate collaboration blew my mind, and even though it’s been out for ages I wanted to write about it here, now I’ve started a blog for such things.

Where previously collaborators have picked a Vans shoe and added their own artistic interpretations, by way of graphics or new material applications, this year Vans invited W)Taps to create three brand new models – the Rudeez, the Greaserz and the Bash.

What I love about the collection is the unique and ambitious concept behind it. It’s clear to me that W)Taps’ inspiration for this collection is the United States of America. W)Taps have picked three of the most culturally influential moments in 20th century American history and created shoes for Vans that epitomise those moments. The Vans brand is as unquestionably American as the SoCal location which gave birth to the company, and both are inseperable in the public consciousness as the founders, the origins, of skate culture. Vans = USA. W)Taps have registered this association as their inspiration, and taken it to the max.

In chronological order, then. The Rudeez are based on the two-tone brogues or wing-tip shoes associated with mobsters in the prohibition era – calling to mind films like Some Like It Hot and Bugsy Malone.

The Greaserz are inspired by Chuck Taylor-style baseball / basketball shoes popular in the 1950s, and are indelibly associated with the birth of the American teenager and rock’n'roll. Again, these were made culturally significant in American visual culture, in this case by James Dean and of course Grease.

Finally, the Bash, (an abbreviation for BAsketball SHoe), take their shape from the Air Jordan III and the late 1980s/early 1990s heyday of African-American crossover influence on mainstream American sport and culture, epitomised perhaps by Spike Lee and Michael Jordan.

I’m from Britain and I can see how these shoes could only have been dreamed up by someone who was not American. Prohibition and mobsterism in the 1920s, the birth of the American teen in the 1950s and the mass appeal of African-American culture which came to dominate the mainstream MTV generation in the 1990s are three key moments in the history of America and its material culture. We in the other countries of the world love to hate America’s cultural imperialism most of the time, but we remain fond of many of its legacies.

What’s amazing about the collection though is not just that the concept behind the collection is so ambitious and so well-conceived, but how W)Taps have managed to fuse Vans’ own history to each shoe in different ways.

Firstly, let’s look at the Greaserz and the Bash. Both feature the slogan RISE ABOVE embossed or embroidered on the shoe. RISE ABOVE is a W)Taps slogan, but it’s worth remembering where it comes from – the Black Flag song of the same name. East or west coast, the shoe of choice in the ’80s punk/hardcore scene in the US was Vans, normally the sk8-hi or old skool. You can glimpse Henry Rollins in sk8-his in this video of Black Flag performing Rise Above, though the best picture of him in Vans is here.The photography of Edward Colver also documents Vans’ omnipresence in the Californian punk scene.

The Greaserz also feature an extra touch which brings them full circle back to Japan. This is my moment of wankery so please bear with me. The rubber toe cap features an unusual curlicue design which I think is reminiscent of the waves on Hokusai’s Great Wave of Kanagawa.

Hokusai’s work is as stereotypically Japanese as the baseball shoe, the two-tone brogue and the Jordan III are stereotypically American. I love how by adding this detail, W)Taps has united the country of inspiration with the place where these cultural monoliths were reinvented. The RISE ABOVE emboss acknowledges Vans’ skate punk legacy which brought both together.

Also taking inspiration from Vans’ dominance in the punk music scene, embossed on the toe of the Rudeez is the motto “Ruder Than You”.

Ruder Than You is the name of an amazing song from the early 1980s by all-girl ska band The Bodysnatchers, and has been a staple of my DJ set for over 5 years. Listen to it here.

It was released on 2 Tone records of Coventry, England as the b-side to the Bodysnatchers’ biggest hit People Do Rocksteady. While I don’t believe Vans ever adorned the feet of 2 Tone artists during their heydey, 2 Tone/ska and Vans share a common motif by which both can be immediately recognised – black and white checkerboard. The Rudeez’ heel tab is a tiny checkerboard patch, another playful allusion to the variety of inspirations behind this design. The association between two-tone brogues and 2 Tone ska is a charming and obtuse reference to yet another subculture to which Vans has allied itself.

W)Taps has set the bar high, both in concept and in execution, for future Vans Syndicate collaborations and I look forward to seeing who is going to step up to the mark.