CONVERSE All Stars are the world's most rock'n'roll shoes, with a pop-culture heritage stretching back as far as the invention of the teenager. And yet they're also supremely democratic and entirely contemporary: everyone wears them, from trendy toddlers to fashion-conscious OAPs. If you want a pair of shoes that say you're a bit subversive, a bit hip, a bit different, but not remotely flash or elitist, you choose All Stars.

Like denim jeans, leather jackets, logo tshirts and all the other sartorial signifiers of youthful independence, All Stars are almost as ubiquitous as shirts and skirts.

They are absolutely everywhere and on everyone. Strangely perhaps, this ubiquity doesn't seem to lessen the All Stars' appeal to the more fashion-conscious trainer wearer. Somehow, these simple, cheap, entirely unremarkable shoes, made of canvas and vulcanised rubber, have retained their cachet.

The Chuck Taylor All Star . . . "Chucks" to the Americans, "All Stars" to the Irish . . .

has an iconic status within pop culture that links early rock'n'rollers with hippy aristocrats, prototype punks with gangsta rappers, grunge icons with indie rockers. Elvis wore Converse.

So did James Dean. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were photographed in matching his-andhers pairs in 1969. Paul McCartney has been wearing them since Wings. When Mick Jagger married Bianca Perez Moreno de Macias in St Tropez in 1971, the groom wore a green three-piece suit and white canvas Converse sneakers. In 1976 the Ramones helped invent punk rock in black-leather biker jackets with drainpipe jeans and black All Stars. Postpunks wore them too, as did alt rockers the Pixies and art rockers Sonic Youth. U2's The Edge is a fan. Kurt Cobain died in his.

Hip hoppers are most often shod by the big three trainer brands . . . Nike, Reebok and Adidas . . . but Snoop Dogg has been a tireless campaigner for Converse, Mos Def has advertised the brand, while Master P based an anti-drugs dirge around his love for All Stars ("Converse the shoes that everybody love/ And I like to wear my Chucks when I step in the club").

For rock fans, the All Stars' most recent shot in the ankle was provided by the Strokes, whose scruffy schoolboy style continues to influence current NME favourites Razorlight and the Kooks, among others. The Arctic Monkeys also immortalised All Stars in song, on 'A Certain Romance': "Well oh they might wear classic Reeboks/ Or knackered Converse/ Or tracky bottoms tucked in socks. . ."

Go to east London today, to what still seems the crucible for many current trends, and check out the cool kids in their skinny jeans, their studded belts and their tight, distressed t-shirts. More often than not they'll have artfully worse-for-wear Converse on their feet, probably the white canvas high-top, with the red and blue rubber piping. Meanwhile, international style arbiters like the American designer Marc Jacobs and British fashion's man of the moment, Giles Deacon, are frequently photographed in theirs. If there's a shoe that comes close in terms of pop cultural hegemony, it's probably the Converse Jack Purcell, the All Stars' only slightly more sophisticated cousin, with its distinctive toe "smile".

Ghassan Hodeib is the buying director for British high-street shoe shop Office and its trainer offshoot, Offspring, which together account for more Converse sales in the UK than any other retailer. He puts the success of the All Stars down to their "flexibility".

"It would be hard to find someone that All Stars don't suit, in one of their variations, " says Hodeib. "There are so many different colours and styles, and Converse crosses social, class and ethnic divides." He points to the allblack high-top version of the All Stars, which sells well to both hip-hop kids and heavy metal fans. He himself wears these, but in the low-top version, "because I'm 35, and high-tops don't look right at my age".

"But whether you're a fashionista or an Ordinary Joe, " he says, "they're easy, they're neat, they're smart, and they're cheap. And they look great with jeans. Like all fashions, these things go in cycles, but as long as denim is around, Converse will sell."

Charlie Morgan is firmly in the fashionista rather than the Ordinary Joe camp. The editor of Crooked Tongues, a London-based "online sneaker resource" and the leading British website for trainer fetishists, he has 15 pairs of Converse All Stars, in multiple colours, out of a trainer collection of 300. Would he feel comfortable wearing his run-of-the-mill white high-tops in the company of sneaker snobs sporting limited-edition, futuristic, Japaneseonly Nikes?

"Definitely, " he says. "A true trainer head would always want to own a pair of high-top All Stars. It's an iconic piece of design: form and function, like a Coke bottle or a VW Beetle. The All Star is the generic training shoe.

They're classic, timeless."

Johnny Davis is a former editor of The Face and another Converse wearer, though not quite of Morgan's commitment. "It's not like you open my wardrobe and loads of colourways fall out, " he says, "although I do have two or three pairs." Davis, too, ascribes the All Stars' continuing success to its iconic status. "They're part of the rock'n'roll blueprint, " he says. "That image of the Ramones and Blondie in black-and-white Converse sneakers is still really potent; this idea of skinny outsiders with guitars. It's what made the Strokes successful and even if people aren't conscious of it when they're buying All Stars, it is definitely the reason they choose them."

Next year, Converse celebrates 100 years of selling shoes. Founded in 1908 by Marquis Mills Converse, the Converse Rubber Shoe Company of Malden, Massachusetts, launched the All Star, the first ever "performance basketball sneaker" in 1917. At the last count, in 2003, it had sold 750 million pairs in 144 countries, making it the world's top-selling sports shoe.

It didn't become the Chuck Taylor All Star until 1923 when the firm recruited a basketball player, Charles H Taylor, as an adviser and representative. (Jack Purcell, a badminton player of all things, didn't get his name on a sneaker until 1935, and they weren't Converse; Jack Purcells were originally produced by BF Goodrich. ) The Chuck Taylor All Star would become standard issue for pro and amateur basketball players throughout the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and remained in use as a sports shoe even until the 1970s, when another Converse endorser, Julius Erving, was redefining basketball at the New York Nets and then the Philadelphia 76ers. Ironically, it was Erving's pioneering of "above the rim" basketball . . . he out-jumped his competitors, basically . . . that set in motion the development of sturdier shoes that could offer increased bounce and cushioning.

Converse tried to modernise, but by 1984, and the arrival of Nike's first Air Jordan basketball boot endorsed by the Chicago Bulls' Michael Jordan, who began his career in Converse . . . the sun had set on the All Star as a sports performance shoe, and on Converse as a rival to the major sports-apparel brands.

The skater-style Converse One Star, introduced in 1970 as an improvement on the All Star, has only ever been a byword for naff.

There's a passage in Robbie Williams's autobiography, Feel, when the self-confessed trainer snob recalls his first ever meeting with his future Take That bandmate Gary Barlow.

Barlow, Williams remembers noticing with dismay, was wearing Converse One Stars.

But as Converse faded as a sportswear brand from the 1960s onwards, the All Star became a fashion item. Until the 1960s, it was available only as a high-top "boot", with the circle patch on the inner upper, and only in black or white, but in 1962, the low-top, or Oxford, shoe was introduced, and four years later new colours (red, navy, pink) were available.

Popularised as leisure shoes by surfers and other subcultures (beats, hippies, etc), soon they were being worn by anyone without a white-collar job to go to.

It's not all been plain sailing, though. Converse first went into receivership in 1928, after a disastrous diversification into the cartyre business and throughout its history it has been acquired by companies that make ribbon cables (Eltra), aircraft electronics and car parts (Allied) and furniture (Interco), with varying degrees of success. The annus horribilis for the All Star manufacturer was 2001, when Converse entered Chapter II bankruptcy in the States, with debts totalling $180m. Production ceased in America, the number of sneakers manufactured each year having already dropped dramatically from 8.4 million pairs in 1998 to 3.9 million in 2000. The company staggered on in private hands until a white knight arrived in 2003, in the shape of Nike, which bought it for $305m, an event observed with a slightly sardonic smile by some sportswear aficionados.

"There is an irony there, " says Johnny Davis, "in that at least some of the people buying Converse are doing it almost as a deliberate statement against the big trainer companies. When in fact now they're just buying Nikes in a different shape." Nevertheless, the current success of the brand speaks well of Nike's stewardship, and Ghassan Hodeib claims sales of All Stars at Office and Offspring "have gone through the roof in the last two years".

Today, All Stars are made in China, Indonesia and Vietnam in multiple variations. They are available in denim, in "distressed leather", with double tongues, with multiple eyelets, knee-high, as a slip-on, and in an extraordinary array of garish colours and print designs.

There's a special, pricier collection produced in collaboration with the American fashion designer John Varvatos, as well as a range of All Star flip-flops, and a kids' collection which includes slip-ons that look similar to Vans, another US footwear staple that has been appropriated from its original design . . . not falling off skateboards . . . for everyday use.

But all these tinkerings are, to the All Star enthusiast, unnecessary diversions from the brilliant purity of design of the originals. Most Converse aficionados will allow cupboard space for the 1966 colours, but for the most part they're sticking to white or black, and they certainly won't be sporting graffiti-emblazoned high-tops with Velcro fastenings. And it's the originals that will last. "Other trends and cults will come and go, " says Davis. "But the original rock look and style will always come back. Converse will always be a part of that."

Somewhere in the world, one suspects, a bunch of unknown kids are today preparing to reinvent rock'n'roll all over again, with a heyho, let's go. But before they strap on their guitars and head outside to the tour van, they'll be lacing up their cheap black canvas and rubber sneakers.