Victor Kan’s First Solo Timberland Lands on the Euro Hiker, the One Nobody Tried to Beat

Timberland has handed the Euro Hiker to Victor Kan, and the result arrives October 17 with a GORE-TEX membrane, a taupe suede upper and a grey mesh side panel that looks nothing like the rest of the brand’s fall catalog. Kan runs Third of June, the downtown New York shop that opened in June in the old West Village Margiela space, with a barbershop occupying the front room. This is his first solo project with Timberland. The notable part is which boot he picked.

The Euro Hiker is the Timberland most Americans could not name on sight. It arrived in 1988, built as a hiking boot aimed at the European market, which is where the name comes from and which is also why it never carried the cultural weight the 6-inch did. The yellow boot had New York. The Euro Hiker had the Alps, at least in the brief. What actually happened is that it took the same route anyway, turning up on 1990s rap acts with Gang Starr among the most visible, and then it receded while the 6-inch kept doing the commercial work. Timberland brought it back in 2023 and has been building it out quietly since, to the point where the company now describes it as a third icon alongside the yellow boot and the 3-Eye. That is a generous promotion for a model that spent two decades in the catalog with almost nobody paying attention, and it is also, judged by what the brand has put behind it in the last three years, roughly accurate.

Kan’s version keeps the Euro Hiker’s proportions and changes nearly everything sitting on top of them. The upper is taupe suede with grey mesh running down the side panels, a construction the original used to save weight and that reads here as a texture decision instead. The tongue is a burgundy brown suede and the collar lining picks up the same color, with a red Timberland tab tucked inside the throat where only the wearer sees it. The hardware is blacked-out D-rings rather than the usual speed hooks, the laces are a black and white speckled cord, and Timberland’s spec sheet lists a secondary lace in the box. A black rubber rand wraps the toe and runs into a black lug outsole, and the tree logo on the quarter is embossed rather than stamped. The GORE-TEX tag on the lateral side is the loudest thing on the whole boot. One oddity worth flagging: Timberland’s own product detail list for this style names waterproof Premium leather, ReBOTL fabric with recycled content, a rubber rand and a lug outsole, and never mentions the membrane, which is a strange omission on a boot carrying GORE-TEX in its name.

Choosing the Euro Hiker is the argument. A first solo Timberland collaboration is a free shot at the 6-inch, the most recognizable boot the company makes and the one that sells on name alone. Kan went instead to the model with no mythology attached, which means this boot has to work on construction and color rather than on what it signals from across a room. That is also what Third of June is built around. The store’s premise is that people who bought sneakers in their twenties still want to, and that the shoe now has to work alongside the rest of what they own. A taupe suede hiker with a grey mesh panel and a waterproof liner is precisely that shoe. For a sense of how the industry once read this category, Nike built the Air Max Goadome in 2000 specifically to answer Timberland’s 6-inch. Nobody has ever built anything to answer the Euro Hiker. That absence is exactly what makes it available. A model with no canonical version is a model an outside voice can rewrite without arguing with anybody, and the boots that turn out interesting in a collaboration are usually the ones where the brand has nothing left to protect.

Retail is $195. A standard men’s Euro Hiker lists at $140 on timberland.com across eight colorways, so the collaboration carries a $55 premium, and the membrane plus the suede and mesh build is where that goes. Inside the same aisle, Nike’s Air Max Goadome Low is $175 for a leather boot with a full-length Air unit under it, and Salomon’s Genesis 2 GORE-TEX is $170 for the trail-shoe version of the same waterproofing. The Euro Hiker has close to no resale record, which is the other half of being the model nobody copied, so there is no secondary number to set this against and there probably will not be one.

The Timberland x Victor Kan Euro Hiker with GORE-TEX is style TB0A2N24APC, listed by Timberland in Olive and Suede Grey. Retail is $195. Sneaker Bar Detroit puts the release on October 17, while the product page at timberland.com currently carries the boot as Coming Soon with no date attached, so treat the 17th as the best available date rather than a confirmed one.

Written by

The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

More from The Sneakers Team →