SZA’s mother spent years asking her to stop stepping on the backs of her shoes. SZA turned the complaint into a design brief. Her first full VANSZA drop gives one sneaker a heel you can fold down and removes the back of another altogether. Call it a bad habit with excellent branding—or a small, persuasive argument that clothes should adapt to the person wearing them.
The newly unveiled campaign takes that idea out of a spotless studio and into California’s sun-baked hills. Photographer India Sleem catches SZA among dry grass and scrub, hot-pink hair colliding with a landscape the colour of old suede. A yellow star cuts across one eye. The clothes look lived in, the ground looks real, and nobody appears especially worried about keeping their Vans clean.
That matters because SZA is not just posing for this one. Vans named her its artistic director in 2025; VANSZA is the first collection to put that title to work. The campaign also brings in Vans Skate Team rider Zion Wright, models Caylee Blosenski and Isabella Carr, and the musician Vans—a cast drawn from the worlds the collaboration wants to connect, rather than a single celebrity floating above them.
The two shoes explain the collection better than any manifesto could. The chunky Knu Skool becomes an open-backed mule; the Authentic Kickdown keeps its familiar shape but lets its heel collapse. SZA has said she wanted everything easy to slide into. Instead of correcting how she wears a shoe, she changed the shoe.
The Kickdown comes in distressed canvas with artwork by Sage Adams. Around it, the clothing pulls from workwear and vintage outdoor gear: roomy denim, cargo pockets, soft utility layers and fish graphics that refuse to take the whole wilderness thing too seriously. The tension is the fun of it. This is gear for going outside, or for looking like you might—without pretending comfort is a character flaw.
Celebrity campaigns usually ask us to admire the star and then notice the product. These images are more interesting when the two refuse to separate. SZA’s scuffed, tactile version of Vans makes sense beside the skaters and models in her orbit: the shoes are built to be worn, rearranged, stepped on and taken somewhere. Even the campaign’s landscape seems less like a backdrop than an invitation to get a little lost.
VANSZA Drop 1 lands on October 22, 2026, through Vans stores and Vans.com. The cleverest thing about it is also the simplest: SZA did not ask anyone’s permission to wear her shoes wrong. She made wrong the point.
