Vans Old Skool Wears Cocona Hiraki's Friendship Bracelets

Cocona Hiraki skates park and draws on everything within reach. Vans gave her an outsole to draw on permanently. The Premium Old Skool Cocona Hiraki, priced at $120, pairs a corduroy upper with suede overlays and a removable friendship bracelet and charm inspired by her Japanese heritage, plus her own artwork pressed into a translucent sole. It reads like a shoebox full of loose ends from a skate trip: safety pins, embroidery, a doodle you would find on a notebook margin. Nothing about it reads like a factory logo pack.

Cocona Hiraki Draws on Her Own Outsole

The translucent outsole carries a sketched palm tree and a smiley face sun on the heel counter, hand drawn illustrations Hiraki designed herself and Vans molded straight into the rubber. This is not a printed graphic dropped onto stock tooling. It is the actual sole unit, made see through so the artwork reads from the side and the bottom both. Pair that with the removable friendship bracelet and charm looped through the eyelets, and the shoe functions as two objects: a skate sneaker and a piece of jewelry you can take off and hand to a friend, the way Hiraki does between competition runs. Vans has leaned on charm hardware before, most recently in its 60th anniversary Charms pack that borrowed silhouette cues from Chanel's La Habana bag, and the format keeps proving it can carry a designer's handwriting without touching the upper at all.

$120 Buys Corduroy, Suede, and a Bracelet You Can Remove

A standard Old Skool runs closer to $75. The Cocona Hiraki asks for $120, and the receipt shows where the money went: a corduroy upper instead of canvas, suede overlays at the toe and heel, a soft leather collar, a higher sidewall finished in gloss, and a Sola Foam ADC insole built with 30 percent bio based material for all day comfort on a board. Material breakdown on the tag lists roughly 30 percent rubber, 30 percent leather, and 40 percent textile, a heavier mix than the brand's $75 canvas standard carries. The DIY details, safety pins, embroidery, the charm bracelet itself, are treated as structural hardware, not stickers glued on after the fact.

A Fabric Named Cocona, a Skater Named Cocona

The shoe also runs on Cocona technology, a real textile treatment from TrapTek that embeds activated carbon from recycled coconut shells into the yarn. That carbon wicks moisture off the foot and pushes it to the surface to evaporate, and independent lab testing has clocked it drying faster than polyester, cotton, and bamboo fabrics of comparable weight. Vans is not naming a shoe after a skater who happens to share a name with the brand's chosen fabric technology by accident. The overlap reads intentional: Cocona Hiraki, the skater, and Cocona, the moisture wicking material, sit on the same shoebox.

1977's Side Stripe Meets 2026's Hand Drawn Sole

The Old Skool's defining mark, the side stripe, started as a doodle too. Steve Van Doren sketched it onto the shoe in 1977 to give the silhouette a signature, and it stuck for nearly five decades. Hiraki's outsole artwork works the same way, a design decision born from a personal mark, not a boardroom brief. Vans built the New Future collection around that idea, handing the Old Skool template to four athletes and letting each one draw over it rather than skin it with a licensed print.

Four Athletes Signed Onto One Silhouette

Cocona Hiraki shares the New Future lineup with Efron Danzig, Tania Cruz, and Karina Rozunko, each customizing the same Premium Old Skool shell with their own hardware and artwork. For Vans, putting a two time Olympic silver medalist alongside three working pros signals where the skate team is pointed next, toward athletes whose personal work, drawings, bracelets, doodles, sells the shoe as much as their competition record does. It is the same instinct that sends charm hardware toward Brain Dead's Tokyo exclusive Magma keychains, treating small personal objects as the actual product rather than an afterthought clipped to the laces.

Two facts hold the shoe together: the outsole is Hiraki's own drawing, not a licensed print, and the fabric technology inside shares her first name by design, not coincidence. At $120 for corduroy, suede, and a bracelet you can hand off to somebody else, the Cocona Hiraki earns its premium tag on material alone, before anyone gets to the story stitched into it.