The Rise of Skater Culture

  In a 1940s California, what else was there to do but spend time in the sunshine? For a lot of young adults living on the Gold Coast, surfing was - and remains - an integral part of the Californian teen experience. Skateboarding as we know it today was born through the boredom of surfers when the waves were too flat, who attached wheels to the bottoms of crates, or wooden planks, and called it 'Street Surfing'. In Paris, the quote "sous les pavés, les plages" arose, meaning "beneath the pavement, the beach". Using much of the same techniques - balance, agility and an illogical fearlessness that teenage boys hail - 'street surfing' provided everything that the sea couldn't; with the bonus of an unheard of urban attitude.


  


Another ten years, the 1980s, and cinema had picked up on this exponential trend. Massively influential films like Back to the Future perfectly engendered the culture that had formed around skateboarding: the clothes were baggy, the attitude was reckless and the denim was doubled. 


Despite the media attention that skating had gained over the precedent forty years, skate parks were still a thing of the future. Since there was no allocated skate spaces, skaters would flock to the urban parts of California, to city centres and densely populated areas where banks, offices and shopping centres dominated; this, naturally, gave way to conflict between the skater making use of the smoothed terrain and marble walls of banks, and those getting a loan or going to work. A lot of places globally banned skateboarding in these places, for the sake of the pedestrian and the conservation of official-purpose buildings. Finally, the 1990s, perhaps the most iconic era for skateboarding, exemplified by Jonah Hill's film Mid 90's, brought about the introduction of magazines gone cult-brands such as Thrasher. 
Thrasher, thirty years on is one of the most mainstream skate brands that seems to have birthed the elitist attitude that some skaters adopted with the entrance of the new millennium. "Why wear Thrasher if you don't skate?" became the question of the 2000s for a lot of skaters, wondering why the girls were now sporting a black hoodie with the notorious brand name in bright, flaming letters on the front. Checkered black and white Vans, once a brand known for its skate-friendly gear, became the symbol of an edgy teenager who, to the disappointment of skaters everywhere, didn't really skate. Many skaters feel that brands such as Thrasher and Vans have been gentrified and diluted by these "posers", but is it fair to say that only those who skateboard should be allowed to wear the mark of a certain corporation? What puzzles me most about this gatekeeping attitude is that it goes against the entire ethos that urban skateboarding was built upon. Before skate parks, skateboarders challenged the administrative purpose of government buildings in big cities like London, Manchester and Brighton, skating on the railings of malls, banks and embassies and using the architecture as an open space for practising their craft. If the foundation of skateboarding was "denying the logic that banks, offices and universities should always be about productivity", then surely to wear a skate brand without being a skater is a similar challenge of purpose? It seems the ethos of skaters was the accessibility brought by urban spaces before skate parks, but it has warped into an exclusive culture that requires gate-keeping, and often has the feel of a 'boys' club'.


  


TONY HAWK - THRASHER MAG

AUGUST 1987
This boys' club, however, has been broken into with female oriented skate brands, such as Meow and Hoopla, that suggest "supporting womxn in skateboarding",  introduced in the early 2010s. Hoopla was founded by professional skateboarders Mimi Knoop and Cara Beth-Burnside, to "encourage girls' participation and progression in skateboarding". It seems that the gap between male and female skateboarders began with the low percentage of female surfers, however. One study found that just 10% of modern surfers were women, and that this would be the highest it's been since the estimated roots of Californian surfing in 1910. Since these statistics show us that much less women were surfing in the first place, it seems plausible that few women would've also made the transition to skateboarding in the 1940s. When I asked a UK skateboarder why he thought people sported skate-wear without being a skater, he said "because they want to attract skaters, but it doesn't work because the skaters [make fun of] them for not being authentic". This suggests that there is an inbuilt desire in skater's to "gate keep" the culture surrounding the sport that makes up a large chunk of their identity. 


  Fortunately, however, it seems that skateboarding is becoming exponentially more accessible to people of all backgrounds, despite race, class and sex. Many skaters have forgotten the true basis of skateboarding in the mid 20th-century, wrapped up in the way it feels to be part of a tightly-knit community, but others will know that the only real posers in the skateboarding societies are those who make it inaccessible to others.

(Annie Jartbomb for Stesso Magazine, 2020) 
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