These Muses Get Serious Air
If Eunjoo Kim squints hard through her office window toward the distant chain-link fence surrounding the etnies Skatepark of Lake Forest, in Orange County, she sees boys buzzing over concrete bowls, boys ollieing across her radar--and only a few girls. The imbalance annoys the heck out of her.
“Everyone knows girls are the best, the smartest, the strongest at everything,” the 28-year-old designer says with conviction. And she’s determined to create clothes that reflect their gumption.
Girls may be late arrivals to skateboarding--they slowly filed into the subculture as events such as the All Girl Skate Jam and, much later, as the beach-street-snow exposition Boardfest emerged to embrace them--but in 2005, the National Sporting Goods Assn. counted 2.6 million girls who said they had skateboarded more than once. By that point, all but a few of the industry’s core brands, including etnies, Vans, DC and Element, were chasing women.
The truth is, with the colorful exception of Kevin Staab, a senior scenester who straps on leopard-print knee pads and takes his hair-color cues from the Skittles rainbow, serious skateboarders veer toward the accepted norm of jeans and T-shirts. Tattoos and piercing(s) are subtle, as are the access codes that separate the real players from the poseurs.
It’s drab by any measure, but the 2007 skater look is also an improvement over the habitual combination of hot pants (wide-wale corduroy shorts with a 3-inch inseam) and nearly knee-high tube socks worn by the early adapters of the sport in the 1970s. It’s no wonder those boys got to circle the drains of drought-emptied backyard pools alone for so long.
Just how to engage girls’ interest in the skateboarding life was up for interpretation. You could look to her role models, in this case athletes who capture the brand’s essence and personify the sport’s creative, independent spirit. But the strategy of using team riders as marketing tools and designer muses is trickier than it appears, particularly in a culture as wrapped up in its (begin air quotes) rebellious (end air quotes) image as skateboarding.
Kim was well-prepared for attitude. When she joined the then-6-year-old brand etnies Girl, a spinoff of Sole Technology Inc., as apparel and accessories designer in 2005, she had already skipped from Paul Frank to Split to Ezekiel, toting her iTunes collection of vintage punk--Bouncing Souls, NOFX, Operation Ivy, Sex Pistols--from gig to gig. Even without that experience, the prospect of outfitting teen- agers in “action-inspired lifestyle silhouettes” would hardly intimidate a young woman who reported to her suburban office in an Audrey Hepburn-inspired ensemble of off-white patent-leather wedgies, black cable-knit tights and a Mod-shaped sweater dress topped with a twill trench coat.
Still, Kim had to wrap her brain around the notion of the “etnies Girl.” Who was she exactly? What would she wear besides hoodies and Ts? She understood this much: A brand with deep roots in skateboarding first looks for answers to those questions in skate parks. If you’re core, you want to woo to your team a skater who wins a lot, someone on a pedestal. Elissa Steamer, a 31-year-old San Francisco transplant who crushes her rivals in virtually every contest she enters, more than suffices. Then, with your street cred established, you can pad out your roster with representatives of your demographic sweet spot. Enter Lauren Perkins, a sunbeam of a Huntington Beach High School senior, and Evelien Bouilliart, a dark-haired and -edged 17-year-old who lives in Belgium.
If Steamer were a font, she would be bold sans serif. She sticks with dark Ts and boy’s-cut jeans in dark browns or black, a reminder to Kim that functionality is paramount. When Steamer asked Kim to create cotton bras and panties, the designer rendered them in a T-rex print, a nod to the skater’s favorite animal.
Perkins, a Nicole Richie/Ashley Olsen-style disciple, routinely patrols South Coast Plaza in search of high-and low-end items that, Kim says, she pairs to great effect. “Lauren pulls in purses and shoes that add a girly-girl touch to her rugged street authenticity,” she says. Like many of her peers, Perkins expects to see trends from the runways in her closet, and so Kim’s spring ’07 collections of casual separates, titled “Cowboy Junkies” and “Bon Voyage,” incorporate the Western and nautical themes showcased last fall in New York.
Finally, Kim views Bouilliart, today’s quintessential skater girl in her skinny jeans, bright Ts with girlish or graphic details and bomber jackets, as a challenge--a project. “She’s finicky now,” Kim says, “but Evelien will evolve as she grows older. I’ll be able to put her in a lot of things.”
The boys in ratty jeans had better bring up their game.
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All Decked Out
Three designers reinvent the skateboard:
BECK(Y): SK8BAGS
designer: Beck Hickey
price: $150
contact: www.beckycity.com
Beck Hickey’s Sk8 clutch juxtaposes a battered skateboard deck and a pristine nickel clasp. (Tony Hawk’s eightysomething mom carries a similar tote featuring one of his discarded Birdhouse decks.)
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SUBHEAD GRIPS: DECK GRIPS
designer: Jesse Milden
price: $8 for six
contact: www.subheadgrip.com
“My fingerprints have vanished from cutting and packaging grip tape,” says Jesse Milden, who grew up skating in Los Angeles and now works as a designer in Seattle. His die-cut stickers work just fine on skate decks, but Milden pictures them as “floor paper” in a slick entryway, as a decorative border around an outdoor planter, as a bathmat. . . .
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Tunto: Skede Chair
designer: Mikko Karkkainen
price: $1,750
contact: www.tunto.com
Among the designers fabricating tables, benches and chairs out of decks, both blank and painted, is Mikko Karkkainen of the Finnish company Tunto. The chair shown here is made with a deck by the skate company Control. Or, if you’ve got your own deck you would like to affix, Tunto sells just the frame and hardware.
