Vans: Checkered Future at Milan Design Week20 Images
An Icelandic musician, Canadian designer and American skate brand walk into the Triennale de Milano. No, that’s not the start of an off-colour joke, but the actual scene at this year’s Milan Design Week (or Salone del Mobile, to use its proper Italian name). An annual trade fair that showcases the latest innovations in furniture and design, this year saw shoemaker Vans take up residence at the iconic Triennale, bringing alien superstar Björk and acclaimed designer Willo Perron along for the ride too. The brand was there to celebrate the redesign of its iconic Old Skool trainer – but this was no average launch party. With a celestial new installation from Perron, a frenetic DJ set from Björk, and a 2,000-strong party to cap things off, this is what went down at Van’s first ever Milan Design Week.
As previously mentioned, the brand was there to unveil the redesign of its Old Skool trainer via its premium OTW by Vans line. Now christened the Old Skool 36 FM, the Old Skool’s slim upper and classic side-stripe was replaced by something a lot more undulating and alienoid, with tubular, criss-crossed laces and a chunky trellised sole. “The inspiration for the shoe was informed by the visual language of sound and the architecture of that,” Ian Ginoza told us, the vice president and creative director of OTW by Vans.
The brand’s renewed focus on sound is actually that new at all. Since its inception in 1966, the label has weaved musicians into its DNA, especially due to music’s subcultural ties to skating. “We really focus on the culture and subcultures of art, design, music and skateboarding,” says Ginoz. “Music is a big part of our history and our DNA of the brand. And so we dove deeper into music and I think from that, it led to the Old Skool 36 FM.” And though the redesign “definitely took a lot longer than what we do with our current icons,” the process was worth it, with a renewed focus on pushing the brand’s style identity forward via a silhouette that is “very different from what we do advance currently,” according to Ginoza.
For its big Salone debut, Vans drafted in acclaimed designer Willo Perron, a longtime friend of Ginoza. You might know Perron for designing Lady Gaga’s The Monster Ball tour, or executing Rihanna’s Super Bowl stage design, or designing Kim Kardashian’s Skims logo, or creating the giant double-C runway from Chanel’s most recent couture (the list goes on and on). For MDW 2025, Perron was tasked with bringing the inspiration for the Old Skool 36 FM – music and soundwaves – to life.
Tucked in a dark, smoky room of the Triennale museum, Perron’s installation Checkered Future: Frequency Manifest explored what soundwaves might look like via a series of giant, collapsing mirrors. Guests lay on metal grates looking upwards, with huge mirrors covering the walls and others suspended from the ceiling in a grid formation above (to mimic Vans’ iconic checkerboard). When the choral, spacey music began – a soundtrack from musician Tim Hecker – the mirrors on the ceiling began pulsating up and down, streams of light beaming from between them.
“Being at design week, being in the Triennale, I was thinking, ‘How is sound attached to design?’ Perron said after the presentation. “What’s the sound of design, and what’s the sound of architecture? That’s the whole principle – to understand what sound looked like.” In this way, when the mirrors sunk low the frequency of the soundtrack also dipped, and when they sprung away things got a bit more light and gleeful. “I wish you could sit there for two hours,” said Perron. “I feel like you have to jump through emotions quite quickly. I go from something super gleeful to something kind of scary, very, very quickly.”
To celebrate the installation and launch of the new Old Skool, Vans also enlisted music icon Björk to kickstart a party at the Triennale. In front of a 2,000-strong crowd, the singer appeared in front of the decks, which were appropriately skyward bound, on top of a giant checkerboard structure erected on the side of the museum. Racing through a frantic set of industrial house, gabba, Middle Eastern R&B and more, the singer literally lit up the night sky in a kaleidoscopic costume along with a huge, glittering light show. Before the event, when we caught up with Ginoza, he was especially effusive about the Icelandic icon, revealing that it was the inspiration for putting this event on. “If you look at her entire career, she is a complete trailblazer and innovator in culture,” he said. “When we were doing this, she was the muse for this moment.”
You might think of Salone as the stuffier older sister to Milan Fashion Week, but that’s where you’d be wrong. After Björk departed the decks, the party continued on, with Vegyn and Evissimax taking to the stage to keep the crowd on a hight. Down below, Milan’s youth partied to the earlier hours of the morning, an especially impressive feat considering it was a Tuesday night.
Scroll through the gallery above to see all the action from the night
