24 Mar VILLAGE PM ON WWD FOOTWEAR NEWS
This New Paris Skate Brand’s Sneakers Don’t Look Like Skateboarding Shoes — and That’s Why People Love Them.
If Basile Lapray, co-founder of Parisian upstart Village PM, has his way, the skateboarding shoes that end up defining the 2020s could look vastly different than the pairs that came before.
Skateboarding shoes can traditionally be grouped into one of two categories. There are the slim-profile, canvas-and-suede vulcanized sole styles introduced by Vans in the 1970s, looks which would go on to be mimicked by countless companies looking for a piece of the action sports business. Decades later, in the 2000s, blockier shoes, with puffed-up proportions and technical overlays, took over the skate landscape. These bulkier builds were made popular by brands such as DC Shoes, És, Globe and Osiris and have seen a resurgence in recent years as Y2K fodder continues to trend.
And there are, of course, some outliers — models like Nike’s skate-repurposed 1980s basketball shoe, the SB Dunk, falls somewhere in the middle of the two silhouettes — but on the whole, these two varieties have dominated the skateboarding footwear scene.
Founded in 2024, Village PM’s footwear doesn’t fit neatly into any of the aforementioned groups. The line, which borrows from Lapray’s outdoor background, including stints at companies like Salomon, gets its signature aesthetic from the warped-and-wrapped rubber soles of climbing shoes. It’s a striking design choice that not only gives Village PM a unique aesthetic in a market consisting of many similar-looking shoes, but adds a new level of functionality and repairability to the skate category.
Lapray told Footwear News that the inspiration to start Village PM came when he and his co-founder, Bram De Cleen, noticed that skateboarders had stopped wearing their skate shoes in everyday lifestyle scenarios. Their peers would often lace up sneakers to skate in, but later swap into a different pair for casual use. This presented an opportunity to shake up the market.
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