One of the hottest sneakers of the summer is a nearly 50-year-old skateboarding shoe inspired by an 11-year-old luxury messenger bag.

It’s been quite some time since Vans had a sneaker release as hyped as its Old Skool “Souvenir,” which is inspired by the revered Chanel On the Pavement messenger bag from 2014. Having sold out expeditiously, it fetched resale prices as high as the $400 range on platforms such as StockX — roughly four times its retail price of $125.

While one buzzy colorway isn’t sufficient in forecasting a brand’s future, evidence is piling up elsewhere to suggest Vans, as well as other purveyors of vulcanized sneakers (skate or otherwise), can anticipate a resurgence in the near future.

During a July earnings call, VF Corp. president and chief executive officer Bracken Darrell pointed to the proliferation of skate-inspired styles on luxury runways as a reason to be optimistic about Vans after a yearslong downturn. “I’m not suggesting that Vans will be growing 9 percent a year from now,” Darrell said, “But I am excited to see the tide turning on skate style shoes, and luxury is where trends start.”

Among those churning the waters for spring 2026 are Prada, which showed a canvas low-top that’s a dead ringer for the Vans Authentic, and Dior, as its debut men’s collection from Jonathan Anderson likewise included kicks evocative of the Vans Era.

“Skate style has really proliferated with the internet, where it’s not really as insular as it once was,” Jian DeLeon, Nordstrom men’s fashion director, told Footwear News on a call Monday. “As a community, it still has its own codes. Real-life skaters and crews have their own way of sussing each other out and vetting what’s cool to them. But the pipeline by which things are appropriated out of it and become TikTok trends is just even faster.”

Skateboarding has always been a core element of streetwear, so it should come as no surprise that skate shoes flourished during the 2010s as streetwear cemented itself as one of the defining trends of the decade. And while trends have since shifted, skateboarding’s influence pivoted to the baggier jeans that are now in favor.

Before its Chanel homage, and before becoming source material for Prada and Dior, Vans became more directly involved in the luxury sector with a Valentino collaboration shown during the Italian label’s fall 2025 runway show.

Sperry, too, will be looking to cash in on the vulcanized momentum with a new push for the CVO, short for “Circular Vamp Oxford,” which is in fact the original boat shoe. Paul Sperry invented the non-slip sneaker in 1934, and it serves as a clear antecedent to Vans with its simple canvas upper and its vulcanized sole.

Before becoming Vans and pivoting to skateboarding, the Van Doren Rubber Company specialized in its own deck shoes. Early skateboarders adopted deck shoes because, before the implementation of grip tape, the soles proved equally adept at sticking to the wood skateboard surface as that of a boat.

Jonathan Frankel, president of Aldo Product Services, which took on the long-term license for Sperry following the footwear brand’s acquisition by Authentic Brands Group last year, said in an FN August magazine story that the CVO is the brand’s “next big style” and that he expects to see an increase in retailer demand for canvas and vulcanized sneakers in the next 12 to 18 months.

“In terms of wearability, the CVO has a wider and even more democratic use than the Top-Siders,” Frankel said. “And there’s equally as much storytelling that we can do behind the CVO, which is fun.”

Even without the pipeline of deck shoes to skate shoes from more than 60 years ago, the preppier world of Sperry isn’t quite as distant from skateboarding culture as one might expect. Consider Brendon Babenzein, the men’s creative director of J.Crew and founder of Noah, which pulls as much from New York City streetwear and skateboarding history as it does from the scene of Long Island beaches.

Babenzein’s J.Crew has collaborated with both Vans and Sperry this year, releasing a cream Authentic with the former in August and a shaggy suede Authentic Original from the latter in April. Noah collaborated with Sperry on the CVO several times late in the 2010s.

If Sperry and Vans are arriving at similar points, Converse could emerge as a more distinct beneficiary in the vulcanized movement. The Whitaker Group founder James Whitner — whose slate of boutiques includes A Ma Maniére, Social Status and APB — expects exactly that, as he told FN: “When Vans is strong, vulcanized is strong. Converse benefits because vulcanized is all better together.”

APB, the most skateboarding-centric of The Whitaker Group’s lineup, is seeing an uptick in Vans sales, while Converse is performing well in TWG’s wider network.

At some point, a comeback for vulcanized sneakers was always bound to happen given the cyclical nature of fashion and how long the major purveyors of them have been established. It also feels like an inevitable consequence of the low-profile, flat and thin-soled trends that have been dominating for several years now, as vulcanized shoes aren’t far off in aesthetic. And like those three categories, which are prone to overlap, vulcanized models are well suited to billowing pants.

Most famous among Vans wearers would have to be the pioneering Zephyr skate team from ’70s Venice, Calif., from which Tony Alva remains closely aligned with the brand, and perhaps there’s no greater counterpart for the Sperry CVO than Fred Rogers, better known as Mr. Rogers.

DeLeon points to the wholesome preschool television host as a style icon for what he calls the “nice boy costumes” of today. “He goes from the sport coat to the cardigan, kicks of his sensible shoes and puts on a pair of canvas plimsolls. In the paradigm where there’s so much negativity, maybe subconsciously emulating one of the most positive symbols many of us grew up with isn’t such a bad thing.”

And therein lies the versatility of vulcanized silhouettes, as fit for a uniform for those who broke into backyards to skate empty pools as the guy whose theme song is , “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” When a shoe is malleable, it wouldn’t be wise to count it out for long.