One deck, a twin tail used by the skater Ishod Wair in 2013, features a print depicting a 1990s-era Coogie sweater, made popular in part by the rapper Notorious BIG. Olivares makes an interesting point in this regard. He says chapters of skateboarding style, and by extension the fashion around them, have been directly inspired by music-based cultural shifts. “Punk had a huge influence on skate in the early 1980s,” he says. “It was massive. By the mid-1990s, though, skate just fully adopted hip-hop, with the one exception being you’d be wearing bulky skate shoes. Whether you lived in the New York suburbs or in Queens, you wanted to look like Mobb Deep when you skated. Not everyone, but a lot of people.”
Eyeing a Palace Skateboards deck, I ask Olivares about high fashion’s more contemporary – and direct – embraces of skateboarding. Palace is a London-based label founded by a group of guys who used to skate the city’s South Bank. It was born with humble, sport-specific beginnings. Yet in 2022, Palace released a well-received global collaboration with Gucci. Supreme, the New York-based brand that started as a skateboard label, reached feverish recognition when it collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2017. The late designer Virgil Abloh, who was also a skater, recognised the sport’s wardrobe appeal and weaved it into his work at both Off-White and Louis Vuitton (post-Supreme). There are many other examples.
“I think it’s all good,” Olivares says. “Skaters can tend to be a little cagey, but I think of the late editor of Thrasher, Jake Phelps, who said he loved every aspect of it. That there’s really no wrong answer in skateboarding.” (Thrasher, for those unfamiliar, is an indie skate magazine founded in 1981 – for a time in the 2010s, its typeface logo became the it motif on the street style scene.)
“When we first started this, the museum thought maybe we’d put in a ‘skate fashion’ section. My feeling was like, that’s just part of the game. All you have to do is look.”
Skateboard opens at the Design Museum from 20 October.
