crooked tongues magazine News Features

Some products are just the acceptable face of childishness. You can bang on about Lego and Crayola without fear of being deemed some Games Workshop dweller, or one of those hoarders of crappy "urban vinyl". They're design classics. We learnt to write and draw using Crayola's elegantly designed tubes of paraffin wax and pigment. Some of us got "up" around the house as young 'uns by leaving waxy scrawls on walls prior to punishment. For a few of us, the nascent beginnings of design-based roles began with Crayola.

If you grew up near a long-defunct Crayola factory in a provincial town, you may have had a ton of dirtcheap Super Washable pens for birthdays, Easter and Christmas year after year before you ever laid hands on a Sharpee. You could practise a tag with Slick Stix too. We love the brand. They even top Nike's madcap colour names and trump Pantone with shades like Purple Pizzazz, Screamin' Green and the mighty Neon Carrot. We're just surprised it took this long for an official collaboration on a shoe to drop.

Just as the homies at Wood Wood got their Brickism on, bringing the best of both worlds, Vans and Crayola makes a weird kind of sense. Bearing in mind that Vans manufactured Ronald McDonald's creepy clown shoes for a while, this teamup is the sort of thing you could expect to find in the archives, with the brand built on a tolerance for crackpot fabrics. There's few footwear palettes to match the Authentic, Slip-On or Sk8-Hi if you're looking to get colourful, and these get it pretty right. The Authentics and Sk8-Hi are the best of the pack. From the stripe around the midsole to the appropriately coloured heel tab, and tactically scrawled upper, they're excellent. Especially in the child and toddler variations.

This meeting of big guns was never going to be a low-key affair, and with several colours set to drop in retailers — including the Crooked Tongues store — very soon, we can see appeal across-the-board. Between these and the impending Superstar KZX NHBD hookup, it looks like the future of collaborations is family-friendliness — possibly to keep the other half distracted. The packaging is worthy of note too, bringing in that familiar shade of orange and green as a fine finishing touch.