Now, you’re a lot more likely to see skaters in nice-fitting jeans and a plain tee, he says.īack when Miller still took to the ramps, everyone wore black tee shirts, baggy shorts, and oversized hoodies. “When I skated, it was kind of like Dead Kennedys, SNFU, punk, you know?” says Lee Miller, a Sales Associate at Oak Bay Bicycles. Skate fashion is constantly entering new life stages. It’s just how people want to dress all the time now which I think is really cool.” “Skate fashion has just become normal fashion. Ward observes that just as skateboarding has become more accessible, so has the clothing. “ It’s nice because everybody’s so welcoming, ’cause everybody kinda knows they all started somewhere,” says Ward.
While the window-smashing youths of the ’90s might have made the skater community difficult to approach, Ward says the dynamic today is different. The normalization of skateboarding is what made it so easy for Alanna Ward, a fourth-year Psychology major at UVic, to start hitting the ramps. Like skating’s going to be in the Olympics now. “There’s no real stopping it so it’s either get with it or get out. Provided photo by Lauren McRae.Īnd as skating’s continued to rise in popularity, it’s had an impact on people’s perceptions, says Summersides. “And that’s why mainstream media gravitates to it now - because they’re always trying to grab at something new, something … different.” Alanna Ward. “It’s one of those few fringe things left,” says Johnsen.
While being on the margins once kept skateboarding from the mainstream, it’s fringe culture is now one of the reasons that it draws the masses - a contradiction if there ever was one. “There was always something that put you on the fringe, therefore too many people didn’t understand it.” “Skate fashion has just become normal fashion. We were all smoking cigarettes and we had dreadlocks and we had this and we had that,” says Johnsen. Shane Johnsen, founder and owner of Tribute Boardshop in Nelson, B.C., also remembers the ’90s skate scene.
#POSER SKATE SHOPS WINDOWS#
They would break your car windows and do whatever they wanted.”īeing on the periphery, skaters from the ’90s - and before - had a hard time becoming accepted into normal society - not that many of them wanted that, anyway. were a lot more fucking punk and they wouldn’t take shit. “Skating in the ’90s was a lot different. In All Vans on deck, we took a look at what’s changed - both good and bad - in the skate fashion industry and beyond.ĭrew Summersides, who rides for leading brands like Emerica, Toy Machine, and RVCA out of Vancouver, took us for a cruise down memory lane. This isn’t just about profit - brick and mortar skate shops can be the heart of a skate community. From the legalization of skateboarding in the streets of downtown Victoria to the announcement that skateboarding will be an officially-recognized sport in the 2020 Olympics in Japan, it’s been almost 30 years since skateboarding’s rise to popularity in the 1990s - and what a ride it’s been.īut with the shift to online shopping that the world has seen in the last decade, some traditional skate shops have seen smaller returns. Skate style has changed just as skate culture has. Now, though, it’s not so uncommon to see anyone from a 12-year-old girl to a 40-year-old hipster sporting a pair of Vans, an oversized Polar Skate Co. If skaters weren’t ripping up the empty pool in your backyard, they were probably already in the backseat of a cop car. In its early days, skateboarding was the sport of outcasts. Design by Austin Clay Willis, Design Director.
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