SZA, who is Vans‘ newly minted artistic director, marked her Paris Fashion Week debut with a front-row appearance at the Louis Vuitton men’s fall 2026 show on Tuesday night, where she also gave fans a sneak peek at the footwear brand’s most recent collaboration. For the appearance, the Grammy winner slipped into the Ladybug Garden, a one-of-one custom Vans Authentic sneaker created for her exclusively by emerging NYC-based jewelry designer Rachel Goatley.
The custom sneakers were designed specifically for Paris Fashion Week, so that the “Snooze” singer’s appearance at the Vuitton show could give maximum exposure to the collaboration as well as the creative minds who designed the shoes.
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The Vans Authentic 44 Ladybug Garden sneakers were created with a white canvas upper and were adorned with sparkling gemstones in rich colors, like yellow and orange citrine, pink sapphire, emerald, and peridot. The sneakers featured gold rectangle shoelace tags with a “VANSZA” logo written in red.
Goatley is a self-taught jewelry designer and a creative partner at Greg Yuna New York, where she has spent the past decade designing fine jewelry. In addition to the Ladybug Garden Authentics, Goatley designed four additional one-of-one embellished Vans pairs for SZA to wear throughout the week in Paris.
The jewelry designer expanded the collaboration across two classic Vans silhouettes, the Authentic and Old Skool. Each pair features custom enamel lace locks, handcrafted in sterling silver, yellow-gold plated, and set with sapphires, topaz, opal, citrine, malachite, and diamonds, which aims to introduce material richness and precision craftsmanship to classic Vans forms.
The additional designs include the “Enchanted Forest,” which is the low-top Old Skool 36 design in the brand’s Le Marais Forest green color. The shoes feature gemstones like malachite, amethyst, pink sapphire, smoky topaz, and opal in the shapes of purple butterflies, flowers, and leaves on the vamp.
The “Radiance” is also an Old Skool 36 design in the brand’s Le Marais Black. The shoes feature silver accents and diamond and opal gemstones on the toe. The “Camo/Earth” is also an Old Skool 36 style in the Le Marais Bungee Cord gray color with smoky topaz, chocolate diamonds, emerald, malachite, star sapphire, pearl, quartz, and moonstone gemstones on the toes.
The “Temperature CTRL,” with the name inspired by SZA’s 2017 album “CTRL,” followed the low-top Authentic 44 silhouette in navy blue. The shoes featured white, yellow, orange, blue sapphire, yellow citrine and garnet gemstones. One sneaker in the pair features yellow stones and gold accents, while the other shoe features silver accents with blue gemstones decorating the vamp.
As fashion week goes on, SZA will continue to showcase the shoes while hosting community events and product giveaways with Vans. In August, footwear company announced that the “Kill Bill” singer would be their first artistic director and that they entered multiyear creative partnership with her.