By: Cora-Louise Fleming-Benite
You’ve most likely seen skateboarders out on the street. Some of your friends probably skate, and maybe even you do too. Even if you don’t skate yourself, skating influences the clothes that we wear, the music that we listen to, and the way that we speak. The sport, which started as a smaller, counterculture activity, has now grown so popular that it affects our lives in ways that seem totally unrelated to the actual act of skateboarding. One of the major ways that it influences us is in our style. Skate fashion cannot be defined as one thing, and it has evolved a lot since skateboarding started. When the sport first became known in the 1950s, it was considered a counterculture activity, and, for the skaters at the time, the clothing that they wore, was certainly not their focus. In the early 1960s, skating gained popularity, and its fame peaked in the 1990s. Our current obsession with the sport aligns with many fads from the 90s having a resurgence now.
When talking about “skater style,” many people think of thick twill trousers, hoodies, and, of course, Vans, which are incredibly popular and synonymous with skaters. Skatewear is now so integrated into mainstream fashion that many designers emulate styles associated with skating. There are several brands that sell a lot of clothes marketed as “skate” clothes, appealing to the current obsession with skate and its style. Demna Gvasalia, head of Balenciaga, and Kim Jones, a designer for Louis Vuitton, have led collaborations with Supreme, a clothing brand often associated with skating. Alexander Wang and Gosha Rubchinskiy, renowned fashion designers, have also designed a lot of clothes strongly influenced by skate apparel. However, many skaters have been dressing this way for decades, and some are saying that the trend of dressing like a skater is an appropriation of their culture. “I think the people who get mad about it are those who try to ‘own’ skateboarding, but you can’t own skateboarding. It’s for everyone and you can’t try to claim it as your own. I think it’s flattering to skateboarding that it’s reaching other areas and other lifestyles, but it sucks if they don’t do it properly or get the right people involved,” says Nathan, an employee of KCDC, a skate shop in Williamsburg (from “How Skaters Really Feel About Fashion’s Appropriation of Their Culture,” by Alexis Castro). A photo book by Jurgen Blumlein and Dirk Voge titled Skateboarding is Not a Fashion attempts to demonstrate how skate style has evolved; the book’s title also appears to be commenting on our culture’s current obsession with the sport, as well as mainstream fashion’s adaptation of its style.
There is a well-known saying that “imitation is the highest form of flattery” — however it’s interesting to consider what it means when people adopt a fashion trend without even realizing what it is that they’re imitating. There are differing opinions on the resurgence of skating and of skate style, but it seems sure that the trend will stick around for awhile.