Strong collaboration power here via two of our favourite brands and this Vans Skate X Magenta Shogo Zama skate shoe collection. What's not to like here honestly? First up, Magenta is one of founding skater-owned-brands of the modern era (alongside Palace etc). It's owned by legit French legends Viven Feil and Soy Panday. Its focus is style and aesthetics over number-crunching bellendery and, perhaps most significantly, they have championed Japanese skate culture through their brand since the very earliest days. In line with this focus on glorious Nippon, this Vans Skate X Magenta shoe collection combines Magenta's flair for aesthetics with direct Japanese influences as Magenta team rider Shogo Zama gets his name on these two bangers. Secondly, it terms of things that 'can't be fucked with' (as the Wu Tang would put it) is the use of two of Vans' most beloved silhouettes in this Vans Skate X Magenta collab. If you're not a fan of the Vans Era or the Vans Chukka then, you're dead to us basically. Anyhow - if Shogo Zama is new to you, you can update your brains via the clip above that welcomed him to Magenta skateboards last year. As you'd expect with all things Magenta - it's steez heavy and about as far removed from the 'let's jump off a building' approach as possible. 
As we're on the topic of the mighty Magenta skateboards and by extension their home town of Bordeaux, France, this seems like a reasonable excuse to champion the work undertaken by Magenta pro Leo Valls. Following an attempt to criminalise skating in Bordeaux, Leo approached the local authority and created a working relationship that completely flipped the script and has ended up with the city embracing skateboarding. Similar to Malmo, this embrace has gone way beyond decriminalisation and has instead seen the city fixing up existing spots, building new skate-specific spaces and recognising the cultural value of their homegrown skateboard community. If you're listening Manchester City Council/ Andy 'king of the North' Burnham - maybe that's a slightly more forward thinking approach than this bullshit? You with us, yeah? Anyway, enough with that - to see the fruits of this, watch the recently released Bordeaux Exposure 3 video featuring Leo Valls, Vivien Feil, Aymeric Nocus, Gauthier Rouger, Tom Penny and numerous other heads. It's sick, it'll make you want to visit Bordeaux and it's got Tom Penny footage. What more do you need?
Bordeaux Exposure 3 from Julien_Januszkiewicz on Vimeo.
