Vans Piles Even More Pearls Onto the Marshmallow Old Skool 36 for an October 8 Restock

Vans is bringing back its bejeweled Old Skool 36 in Marshmallow on October 8, this time dressed in even more pearl and crystal detailing than the original run.

Vans has a two word habit this year: put pearls on it. Vans confirmed this week that the Old Skool 36 Pearlized “Marshmallow” returns October 8, restocked with a heavier dose of the same embellishment that sold the original pair out within weeks of its 2025 debut. It is the fourth stop on a six colorway calendar the brand is spacing out across the rest of 2026, and proof that a single design idea born inside one collaboration can end up carrying an entire season on its own.

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The pair carries the style code VN000ZB8CDA and returns to shelves at Vans.com and select retailers for $130, the same price anchor every colorway in the Old Skool 36 Pearlized run. The upper mixes canvas side panels in an off white “Marshmallow” tone with natural suede across the toe, heel, and lace panel, all of it finished with faux pearl and small crystal studs. Those embellishments used to sit mostly along the Sidestripe and toe box on the original pair. This time they have spread to the tongue and heel panels too, giving the shoe noticeably more sparkle without changing its basic color story. Vans kept the rest of the build deliberately scuffed: a pre distressed midsole, worn in laces, and a thin black line traced around the sole unit, all meant to read like a shoe that has already lived a little, been repaired, and picked up a few stories along the way. A Sola Foam ADC insole handles comfort underfoot, and the sneaker sits on Vans’ familiar waffle outsole.

Marshmallow has always been the quieter half of this pack. Its Fuchsia sibling, which launched alongside it in November 2025 and returns again as part of the same restock wave, leans into a louder, more punk inflected palette with black paneling and contrast stitching against the pearl detailing. Marshmallow keeps things closer to neutral, built around the off white canvas and suede combination with only a thin black stripe running through the midsole to break up the tone. Both pairs are sized in adult unisex sizing and sold through the same channels, giving shoppers who missed the first run a straightforward path back in without needing to chase a specific style number beyond VN000ZB8CDA.

A pair of white Vans Old Skool sneakers decorated with pearl studs, resting on a dark textured surface.

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The outline underneath all that jewelry is one of the oldest in Vans’ catalog. Style 36 debuted in 1977 as the second skate shoe Vans ever made, and the first to carry the brand’s now signature Sidestripe, a design detail that would go on to define nearly every icon in the Vans lineup that followed it. The shoe was renamed the Old Skool in the early 1990s, and its eventual 30th anniversary helped cement its status as an official Vans Classic. The Pearlized treatment does not touch that foundation. It layers a higher gloss sidewall and more deliberate stitching onto the same shape, which is standard practice for anything filed under Vans’ Premium line: keep the silhouette recognizable, elevate the materials and finish around it. Vans describes that broader approach as its Premium ethos, a running effort across several icons in its catalog to pair modern comfort with updated fit and finish rather than reinvent the shapes themselves.

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The embellishment itself has a more recent and more specific origin. It traces back to OTW by Vans, the brand’s own pinnacle collide platform, first announced in 2023 as a home for partnerships spanning art, design, music, and skate culture beyond Vans’ usual output. Vans put creative direction of the platform under vice president Ian Ginoza, who described it at launch as a return to the brand’s “Off The Wall” roots rather than a departure from them. One of the platform’s earliest and most consequential pairings arrived in 2024 with Satoshi Nakamoto, a Los Angeles streetwear label that had already built a reputation for hand customizing Old Skools with pearls and crystal studs before Vans came calling. That original OTW by Vans x Satoshi Nakamoto Old Skool, done in olive drab canvas with the label’s handwritten branding on the tongue, sold out quickly and gave Vans a clear signal that the look had legs beyond one collaboration.

By November 2025, Vans had folded that same pearl and crystal lang into its own mainline Old Skool 36, launching the first Marshmallow and Fuchsia colorways as a standalone Premium release rather than an OTW branded connection. That distinction is worth making plainly: despite how often resellers and secondary marketplaces still list this shoe under the OTW name, Vans’ own product pages catalog the Pearlized Old Skool 36 as a Premium and LX rel, filed separately from the OTW platform it borrow its show from in the first place.

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The October 8 Marshmallow restock is one piece of a bigger rollout. Vans opened its Fall/Holiday 2026 Pearlized calendar on September 10 with a nautical “Yacht Club” colorway, and plans to follow it with “Lime Pop” on November 12, a “Black/Marshmallow” pair on November 27, and “Red” on December 10. A restock of the Navy colorway lands alongside Marshmallow on October 8 as well. Every pair in the lineup carries the same $130 price tag. Vans has already used a raffle system at select flagship stores for the Yacht Club launch, a response to how quickly the November 2025 originals disappeared once they went live.

The scale behind that kind of demand is worth noting too. Vans operates more than 2,000 retail locations worldwide under parent company VF Corporation, selling in over 100 countries through a mix of owned stores, distributors, and wholesale partners. A single embellished colorway launched through one small collection two years ago has since become recur, mainline program for a brand of that size, which says as much about how quickly a good idea travels through a company like Vans as it does about the shoe itself.