When you think of a classic Vans sneaker, what comes to mind? Their iconic low-rise, slip-on profile, certainly. Their immediately recognizable black-and-white checkerboard design. Their ultra-grippy rubber waffle sole. They’re simply the quintessential skate shoe, cemented in the culture for the past 60 years. What few people know, however, is that they started as a boat shoe—in country clubs and on yachts, not in skate parks and empty Californian swimming pools. It’s the burgeoning skate community of the 1970s that realized their full potential back in the day, and this early evolution is what gave us the Vans we know, the one that lives rent-free in our minds as the archetypal slip-on. They’re the original flip-and-reverse-it sneaker brand. Basically, disruption is in Vans’ DNA.
Go Off the Wall is the manifestation of this ethos, the idea that when you know your own worth and how to apply it to your work, absolutely nothing can stand in your way. Along with Vans and Zalando, we’ve tapped three artists who are unabashedly blazing their own paths in their respective fields, letting their art speak for itself while bucking every convention in their path. Like Vans, what they bring to the table is a true understanding of what it means to be creative: not just the ability to make something pretty and pleasing, but to put something out in the world that inherently challenges the status quo.
As the head of Njoya Studios, Ibby Njoya uses set-spatial design, furniture design, paintings, and sculptures, to create breathtaking worlds. Using everyday materials, he pulls from his Cameroonian-British heritage, as well as his own ever-expanding imagination to draw his audience into playful, surrealist landscapes. You’ve seen his work on everything from high-end magazine covers, to some of the most famous shop windows in the world, to fashion week runways at the four corners of the globe. Everything he touches is automatically imbued with his multidimensional personality: dashes of color and whimsy, sprinkled atop a deep current of earnestness.
Daria Riya Dash’s artistic practice cannot be defined by one genre—it has to be seen to be believed. The Ukrainian movement artist and athlete pushes the boundaries of her body as well as her audience: spinning, gliding, throwing herself around the space as if she is both a marionette and a master puppeteer. Turning traditional performance literally on its head, she uses aerial work to convey her deepest emotions. It’s movement as art, not dance, not gymnastics, not performance art… but something new entirely.
It makes sense that Ouri is currently obsessed with playing the harp. It’s an instrument that is both imposing and extremely delicate. You have to exhibit strength and precision to make it sing, and Ouri’s music has both of those qualities in spades. As a multi-instrumentalist (she also plays the piano and the cello), an electronic music producer, and a DJ, the French-Guinean artist has a grip on music-making that is uniquely her own. Her classical training gives her modern compositions a sumptuous edge, slicing through traditional sounds with futuristic sensibilities.
Each of these three artists all Go Off the Wall in their own way. Like the skater kids who took their OG Vans from boat clubs and into sweltering city streets, they are constantly discovering new ways to transcend their environments by any means necessary. And they do it without permission, on their own terms.
To discover more about Go Off the Wall, visit the full collection page at Zalando.
