Street Style

The recent House of Vans pop-up experience in downtown Joburg brought the local skating, design and music communities together.

- Garreth Van Niekerk

House of Vans events are well-known around the world for their colourful celebrations of street culture, and heady interdisciplinary mashups of art, food, music and design. And true to form, the brand’s most recent popup – in downtown Johannesburg – took the city by storm. For three days the festival’s art installations, exhibitions, skating demonstrations, musical performances and design stands restored life to the tin buildings at 1 Fox in a manner reminiscent of how these sheds must have pulsed with life during the gold rush itself. The coolest kids were in town for a weekend of fun.

The event, put together by agency The Bread (with whom House and Leisure collaborated with for our Joburg Issue in 2018) took its design and decor cues from the offbeat charm of California’s supercool Venice Beach. This iconic skateboarding spot is also known for its boardwalk of design shops, buskers and street art murals, and 1 Fox was accordingly transformed into a pastel-infused village – complete with a millennial-pink lifeguard shack, a lounge celebrating the best in local furniture design, a traders’ village where the best in local skating products found a home, and a market.