FAKIES IN FASHION
When skateboarding intersects with fashion, the fashion within skateboarding is to interpret that intersection as an exploitative appropriation of skate culture. But as skateboarding’s status rightly expands, is that default always the right line to take? One skater-turned-editor examines his prejudices.
My first deck was a Vision Gator in violent yellow. I set it up with Tracker trucks, green Slime Balls, plus pink riser pads and rails because this was the ’80s and that’s how we rolled. That deck also bore a sticker that said “Skateboarding Is Not a Crime”. For the few formative years when that deck (plus its eventual replacements) were my most treasured possessions, one part of skateboarding’s attraction to me was that, actually, it kind of was a crime. Skating the Southbank undercroft by the National Theatre in London was especially fun: the passing matinee crowd would stare uncomprehendingly or sometimes with outright hostility, and security would sometimes hassle. At that and our other regular spots – Kennington, Stockwell, Meanwhile, Romford, sometimes even Knebworth – the vibe was always cool, non-judgemental and egalitarian because we were all skaters. But skating in between them, or just street skating, there was always disapproval and occasional danger to negotiate along with London’s skate-unfriendly paving stones.
When skating was rained off, we’d watch on VHS or read about in magazines other skaters who seemed to have it all: constant Californian sunshine, smooth pools and endless silky concrete sidewalks. But skating was thrillingly outlaw in the US too: being chased by security or police was a meme of skateboarding that established its culture as inherently counter. As a skater and a kid you fostered a sense of injustice, and a disregard for authority. The 1989 Bones Brigade video Ban This featured a segment called The Greater Gutter Open, a skate-satire of televised golf coverage that lampooned the double standard with which society viewed the two “sports”. There was a piece by Carl West headlined Skateboarding Is a Crime in the June ’89 issue of TransWorld Skateboarding written from the point of view of a crack-taking schoolkid who watches some skateboarders get ticketed by the police that ends: “He was glad people didn’t hassle him for the things he did.”
That hassled dynamic, although lessened, continues to this day. And it is, I reckon, the root of skateboarding culture’s long-standing sensitivity to any suggestion that corporate fashion is appropriating its codes. Because when the security guards or cops at the mall hassle you for skating it to “protect” customers in stores that sell stuff that’s been pinched from skating culture, you justly feel doubly hard done by. The lapsed skater in me means that I have long recoiled at seeing skate culture decontextualised and repackaged for mainstream consumption. However, as the infuriating last-decade trend of non-skaters wearing Thrasher T-shirts demonstrated (although I guess Thrasher is pretty happy about it), the mainstream is increasingly attracted to skate culture. And as skating has become fashionable, even among those who do not skate (lame!), I’d argue that there is an increasingly productive intersection between the two. Obviously, straight-up appropriation is not cool. I love Jeremy Scott dearly but the widely calledout Autumn ’13 collection adaptation of Santa Cruz artist Jim Phillips’ Roskopp Face deck design was an example of that. There was the time in 2015 Kendall and Kylie Jenner released a voicemail T-shirt that was too conceptually close to Call Me 917’s Dialtone design from the year before for creative comfort.
More often though, fashion efforts to integrate skateboarding imagery have just been painfully cheesy and laughably disconnected from their source material. To me, skateboarding in tailoring is often incongruous because the formality, constraint and rigidity of tailoring are inherently contradictory to the informality, freedom and fluidity of skateboarding. Furthermore, suiting is the costume of work and perceived authority, whereas skating is (even for pros) a blissfully anti-authoritarian recreation. That’s why DKNY posing up the late great skater Dylan Rieder in a slim-fit black suit alongside Cara Delevingne in a New York skatepark seemed whack in 2015, as did building a skatepark as the setting for a Dior Homme show back in 2016, as does a billboard advertisement for a bank in Milan featuring a suited skating executive that makes me chuckle every time I pass it.
But that residual militant skaterism is maybe not always entirely balanced – and balance is pretty important, both in skating and beyond. I admire the fact that Ermenegildo Zegna sponsors the Italian skater Ivan Federico with apparently little fanfare, and in fact the recent adaptations to the tailoring template designed by Alessandro Sartori are all about flexibility and deformalisation – he’s doing to tailoring what Tony Alva and co. once did to swimming pools – so the fit feels real. I’ve also seen a fair few skaters on the runway – at Issey Miyake, an Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood show, and also an Ashish show back in 2015: it never seemed egregious. At Ashish the skaters were female and one part of a broader show concept about the value of subcultures and the joyful interaction of human difference – it was great.
Furthermore, appropriation is a two-way street. Shawn Stussy (not a big skater himself, but a regular advertiser in my collection of ’80s Thrashers, and a lifelong fashion hero of mine) logo-flipped Chanel and Rolex. Ralph Lauren is arguably the most ripped-off mainstream fashion brand in skate fashion. Supreme
owes a significant creative debt to Barbara Kruger and once flipped a Calvin Klein Kate Moss bikini shot for one of its T-shirts. Hilariously, James Jebbia’s company was sent a legal warning by Louis Vuitton for appropriating its monogram years before the Kim Jones-orchestrated collaboration with Supreme marked a consummation of the long and sometimes awkward flirtation between fashion and skate.
Some skaters were pretty appalled by that collab, and those sensitive to what they see as cultural appropriation from skate remain highly suspicious of the house under Virgil Abloh. But the thing about Abloh is that skating is an authentic element of his many-faceted life experience – he too pursued The Search for Animal Chin – so reflecting that passion in his design is simply a form of creative honesty. And sure, the Off-White logo looks like the H-Street logo – that bugged me for months when I first noticed it – but both logos closely resemble that of a 1960s Margaret Calvert design for a Scottish airport: and if Stussy can logo-flip, why not Abloh? More seriously, when you consider what Abloh is doing at Vuitton, well, it’s in many ways skatishly subversive: he’s assumed creative control of the masculine half of the grandest luxury house in the world and transformed its language and lens to be diverse and egalitarian. Sure, Vuitton is always going to be expensive but it no longer excludes – quite the opposite.
When they do eventually happen, the Tokyo Olympics will include skating, which is just fascinating. Because while the notion of skaters wearing a formal uniform feels fundamentally contrary to the scrappy outsider spirit of the discipline, through what wearing that uniform represents those athletes will be promoting skateboarding to a new level of celebration and acceptance in society. That Greater Gutter Open joke no longer really applies. Skateboarding is no longer a crime. And skating is no longer a defenceless victim of fashion. Palace is pumping out collaborations with Jeremy Scott’s Moschino and Ralph Lauren, Vans made a Karl Lagerfeld shoe to run alongside the Half Cab, Tony Hawk launched his collection at Paris Fashion Week, and there’s a skater running menswear at Louis Vuitton. So maybe the relationship has flipped: instead of fashion culture exploiting skate culture, today something much more mutually consensual and creatively productive seems to be afoot. Meanwhile that whole “if you can’t drop in you can’t dress like us” philosophy feels as anachronistically intolerant as a mall security guard of yore. I’m probably not entirely balanced – I was never the greatest skater, either – but watching two worlds I love collide is fun. The next time I skate (very carefully these days) down to the supermarket, I’m going to wear a L’Uomo Vogue tee.