No single shoe captures an entire era the way the Osiris D3 captures the early 2000s. It was enormous, padded, bubbled, looped with extra laces and hidden pockets, a skate shoe that looked less like footwear than like a piece of inflatable furniture. It was also, for a few years, one of the best-selling skate shoes in the world. The story of Osiris is really the story of that shoe, and of how fast a whole style can rise and then vanish.

The chunk

Osiris was founded in 1996 in the San Diego area, one of dozens of skate brands that came up in the boom, and it would have stayed a footnote if not for the D3. The original launched in 1999, but it was the D3 2001 redesign that became a phenomenon, the definitive version of the oversized, maximalist, faux-technical skate shoe that defined the moment. At its peak Osiris was reportedly doing around fifty million dollars a year, and the D3 had jumped the fence out of skating entirely, onto the feet of Fred Durst and onto MTV, a skate shoe that turned into a pop culture object.

The fall

And then it was over almost as fast. By the mid-2000s skating turned hard against everything the D3 stood for. The new look was the opposite, thin, flat, simple, vulcanized, the slim shoe you could actually feel your board through, and the giant padded skate shoe went from everywhere to embarrassing in what felt like a single season. Osiris faded from skate relevance, eventually stopped sponsoring skaters altogether, and became a kind of shorthand for a style the culture wanted to forget.

Y2K brings it back

The funny thing about styles the culture wants to forget is that the culture always comes back for them. The Y2K revival of recent years has dragged the D3 back into the conversation, viral and reissued, even echoed when A$AP Rocky and Under Armour put out a clearly D3-inspired shoe in 2018. Osiris still exists, still sells, a much smaller operation than its peak, leaning on exactly the nostalgia that once embarrassed it.

There is something honest about Osiris that the more dignified brands cannot offer. It does not pretend to be anything other than what it was, the loudest shoe of the loudest era in skate footwear. The D3 was excess made physical, and for a couple of years excess was exactly what people wanted. Then they did not, and Osiris paid for it, and now a new generation that never skated in one thinks the D3 is the coolest thing it has ever seen. Trends do not really die. They just wait for the people who were embarrassed by them to grow up, and for the people who missed them the first time to fall in love. The D3 is on its second life. It will probably get a third.