Vans has spent the last decade watching Nike and adidas trade the streetwear spotlight back and forth, mostly staying out of the way. The Old Skool 36 "Souvenir" collection is the quietest possible way to remind everyone the brand is still in the room — no celebrity co-sign, no hype-beast countdown timer, just a spray-painted canvas shoe that references a Chanel bag most sneakerheads have never heard of, rolling out one colorway at a time across an entire summer.
The Asphalt Grey/Pink pair opened the run on June 25, following an UNDEFEATED early-access drop on June 21. Faded Black and Oatmeal Beige land together on July 23. Navy Blue closes it out on August 20. Every pair sits at $125, filed under Vans' Premium label rather than the standard line, with style codes running VN000E8VE4A, VN000E8VEMV, VN000E8V2N1, and VN000E8VNVY respectively.
The Chanel Reference Nobody Asked For, and Somehow It Works
Here's the detail that makes this collection more than another seasonal colorway update. The design draws directly from Chanel's "On the Pavements" messenger bag, a 2015 piece covered in graffiti-style spray paint and tweed panelling that turned a luxury accessory into a deliberately scuffed-up street object. Vans took that same idea and ran it backwards — instead of luxury pretending to be street, this is a $125 skate shoe borrowing luxury's most self-aware trick.
The execution holds up under close inspection, too. Sneaker Bar Detroit's release photos show spray-painted canvas layered with leather reinforcement at the toe, eyestays, and heel, plus a multicolored tweed stripe running the length of each panel. The removable Vans-branded pins are the part that will split opinion — repositionable hardware on a $125 shoe is either a nice bit of personalization or an unnecessary gimmick, depending on how cynical you're feeling that day.
Why This Matters Beyond Vans Loyalists
Old Skool has been the industry's background noise for so long — the shoe every skate shop stocks, the one your cousin who doesn't care about sneakers still owns — that it's easy to forget how rarely Vans pushes it into genuinely considered design territory. Most of what the brand releases is a straightforward colorway swap. The Souvenir collection is Vans treating its most basic silhouette like it deserves a real concept, and staggering four colorways across three months instead of dumping them all at once is a smarter release strategy than half the "hype" drops crowding sneaker calendars this year.
Old Skool's staggered rollout also says something about where Vans thinks its audience actually is right now. A single hype drop plays to resellers and bots. Four colorways spread across three months plays to people who'll actually skate in the shoe, wear it out, then come back for the next one because they liked the last one — a much smaller, much more loyal buyer than the flip crowd chasing a Jordan restock.
Getting It in India — The Gap Between Old Skool and Premium Old Skool
Vans is not a fringe import brand here the way some skate labels are. The standard Old Skool sells through Vans.in, Myntra, and flagship stores in every major mall, usually somewhere around ₹4,000 to ₹4,500 depending on the colorway. That's the easy part, and it's worth knowing before you assume every Vans release requires an import plan.
That official footprint is exactly why the Souvenir gap stings more than it would for a brand with zero India presence. Nobody expects a Chanel-referencing collection to show up at a mall kiosk, but Vans already has the retail infrastructure here — the stores, the e-commerce, the distribution deals with Myntra and Ajio. Premium-label US drops like this one still rarely get folded into that infrastructure, official or eventual, which says less about India demand and more about how conservatively global brands plan their India catalogues.
Realistically, this pack lands here through Superkicks' import listings or personal shipping. Convert $125 to roughly ₹10,400 and add the 35 to 40 percent that customs duty and IGST typically tack onto a footwear import, and you're looking at a landed price closer to ₹15,000 to ₹16,000. That's triple the cost of the standard Old Skool for a shoe that, from three feet away, most people will clock as "the same shoe, cooler colors."
Our honest read: Vans has always sold better with India's skate and tech-city crowd than with the Jordan- and Dunk-first buyers dominating Delhi and Mumbai's sneaker conversation. If you're seriously chasing the Souvenir pack, splitting an import order with two or three friends is the only way the shipping and customs math starts making sense on a single pair.
Our Take — Buy the Idea, Skip the Import Tax
The Souvenir concept is genuinely one of Vans' better design ideas in years, and the Faded Black colorway specifically earns its price tag on craft alone. But paying a 40 percent customs premium to import a Vans Premium release, when the standard Old Skool already delivers most of the silhouette's appeal for a third of the landed cost, is a hard sell for anyone who isn't already deep into the Vans catalogue. This is a collector's purchase, not a practical one — buy it because you want the Chanel reference in your rotation, not because you think it's a better daily shoe than the ₹4,000 version sitting in a Myntra cart right now.
If skate-inspired low-tops are your lane but you'd rather skip the import math entirely, our in-stock Nike Dunk Low lineup covers the same low-profile, canvas-and-leather territory the Old Skool has occupied since the 70s — and every pair ships from India with none of the customs guesswork. For the fuller story of how a skate shoe becomes a street-style staple, our piece on the history of the Nike Dunk in India traces exactly that arc for a silhouette that took a similar decades-long route to relevance.
