Osiris

Osiris makes skate shoes, not decks — if you landed here looking for wood, what’s here is the bulkiest shoe you’ve ever seen. It was founded in California in 1996, and the founders include Swedish skater Tony Magnusson, previously a part-owner of H-Street, alongside Brian Reid, Tony Chen and Doug Weston. The name wasn’t an accident: Dave Mayhew told Jenkem that his old board sponsor, Evol, wanted to start a shoe division and he talked them into giving it a different name. They took “Osiris,” and he joined in 1996 with Adam McNatt, Gershon Mosely and Tyrone Olson as the original squad.

History

Osiris is the brand that best sums up the look of the late ’90s and early 2000s. The video “The Storm” put the team on the map: Mark Nickels, who filmed it, remembers in Jenkem that the downtown San Diego premiere sold out three times with the line still around the block, something no other video was doing then. “Subject to Change,” the 2002 “Aftermath” tour and “Feed the Need” (2007) followed.

And then there’s the D3, the shoe that overflowed everything. Mayhew says the idea came from looking at a hiking boot in a Sports Authority: he liked its big lace holes and suggested running them down the side of the shoe, getting smaller toward the toe. Almost nobody liked it at the first tradeshow; six months later shop owners were telling him they’d bought a second house off his shoe. Fred Durst and Avril Lavigne wore them. Brian Reid, who designed the lower and rear of the shoe and later the D3 2001 with Magnusson, points out in Jenkem that these are two different shoes — the D3 and the D3 2001 — and that the second was designed entirely in Korea. Osiris stopped sponsoring teams before October 2014.

The team

The brand has no team today, so what follows is history only. The founding squad was Dave Mayhew, Adam McNatt, Gershon Mosely and Tyrone Olson. Around “The Storm” the roster included Josh Kasper, Peter Smolik and a teenage Jerry Hsu. Thrasher’s 1999 and 2000 issues carry Osiris ads featuring Kanten Russell and Mayhew. Later came Scotland’s John Rattray, Stu Graham, Dave Wallace, Caswell Berry, Taylor Bingaman and Lee Yankou, signed in 2012.

The shoes

The Osiris catalogue is, essentially, the D3 and its descendants. The official store sells the D3 2001 — the dominant model, now with 25-year anniversary runs — plus the D3 OG, D3 E and D3 S, along with the Clone, the Rec, the Peril, the Pixel, the Rize Ultra, the Troma ALT and the NYC 83 CLK. These are tall, heavily cushioned cupsoles with a lot of material on top; the side loops that made it the most recognisable silhouette of the era were trademarked as “super loops.”

Who it’s for

Osiris is for people who want exactly that: the big 2000s silhouette, protection and presence. If you want a light, thin shoe with board feel and minimal weight, this is not your brand — it’s the opposite brand. And if you want a team to follow, it isn’t either: Osiris hasn’t had one in a decade. Line it up against the rest in the shoe catalog.