California and the One Star

The Converse One Star has a stranger biography than most sneakers. It started as a basketball shoe in the early 1970s, got picked up by skaters when it became cheap and widely available, and ended up as one of those accidental icons—the kind of shoe that accrues meaning through use rather than marketing. That particular credibility is genuinely hard to manufacture, which is why it survives every few years of collaborative reissuing.

Stüssy launched in 1980 out of Laguna Beach surf and skate culture and grew into one of streetwear’s foundational labels, drawing simultaneously from graffiti, surf, and whatever was playing loud in California at the time. The graphic language is immediately recognizable even to people who’ve never owned a piece. The signature logo has become shorthand for a whole lineage, and the brand knows it.

The One Star ’74 × Stüssy collaboration puts three Stüssy graphics on the tongue of the classic silhouette—colored suede, black midsole, branded sole. Three colorways: mauve, black, hunter green. The mauve is the one worth paying attention to. What’s interesting here isn’t really the shoe itself; it’s the argument the pairing makes. Putting these two names together is a claim that there’s a continuous thread running from 1974 skateboarding to right now, and that the thread is still, stubbornly, worth pulling. Available via Converse and select retailers.