The World’s Hottest Skate Shoe Just Got Hotter
The world’s hottest skate shoes look nothing like a skate shoe. Village PM’s first sneaker, the 1PM, has the appearance of a climbing shoe and even utilizes climbing shoe technology, but it's built for kickflips.
While the original 1PM successfully hides its skating performance credentials, this dapper new iteration takes things one step further. This still looks like an asymmetrically laced approach shoe, but features the soft-grained black leather of a dress shoe. Basically, it looks even less like a skater.
In fact, the black leather 1PM borders on being dressy, but as Village PM states in its press release, “Sometimes, you just want to wear a black leather shoe.” And you can’t deny that the small French skate label has cooked up an especially handsome one.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. This all-black creation, releasing on May 6 as the brand’s first “limited edition online exclusive” was too good to fail.
The 1PM brings all the innovative doodads from high-tech climbing shoes onto a high-tech shreader, which means recreating the streamlined shape of an approach shoe, having laces wrap around the natural shape of the foot, and inventing its patented “rubber glove” outsole that’s stuck-on without sewing and easy for a cobbler to replace.
The result is a certified sneaker hit, but it’s getting praise for more than just its performance.
The shoe made Highsnobiety’s “best shoes of 2025” list because, as our editor-in-chief Noah Johnson wrote, “the fellas at Village PM really cracked the code... For me it’s the clean lines and choice materials.” And the 1PM featured as one of the Lyst Index’s hottest products of Q1 2026, one of the first times — if not the first time — that an indie skate sneaker cracked the top 10.
That makes it the world’s hottest skate shoe by default.
Village PM can do no wrong. In all-black, too? Impossible to be more right.
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