Sommaire pour January 2016 de Surfer

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, guys like Shaun Tomson and Dane Kealoha pioneered the pig-dog stance, a barrel-riding technique that was at first more functional than it was stylish. Pig-doging allowed surfers to drop in late and deep, but between the crouching, the ass draging, and the outside-rail death grip, it wasn’t exactly a graceful picture. Now, after a few decades of refinement, form has caught up to function, and the best surfers in the world have backside tube riding down to an art form. Here, Matt Wilkinson goes to town on a South African canvas.…

Style is found in calmness, joy, the fine details of body language, spontaneity, agression (sometimes), and flow. It’s a most pleasurable show when these ingredients all come together. I love to watch Tom Curren, Kelia Moniz, Rob Machado, Joel Parkinson, Mason Ho, Alex Knost, Dave Rastovich, and Dane Reynolds. They’re all true performance artists, and it’s magic when they ride a wave. The most stylish people are born with the ability to not overthink, and to operate on feeling. When it comes to style, intuition is powerful, but I think style can be worked on—to a degree. Things like hand placement, posture, and where lines are drawn on a wave face can all be improved. But when feeling takes precedence over thought, the style that results is your own unique…

I was lucky as a kid because I got to hang with surfers who clued me in early, teaching me the value of all these different designs. Today it seems like everybody understands that value, which is really cool. Surfing is in a brilliant spot where people ride whatever they want and there’s no stigma. With surfoards, it always helps to ask the guys whose surfing you admire what they rode. I remember asking Gerry [Lopez] about the perfect length for Pipe boards, and he said “Nothing biger than 8'2", but ideally 7'8" or 7'10".” So I started riding 7'8"s and 7'10"s. I’ve had the same conversations with Skip [Frye] and David [Nuuhiwa] about longboards. You don’t really have to question certain people on their equipment. They knew what they…

It’s that time of year again, when surfing’s most fashion-forward flaunt their freshest new looks. This year’s Fashion Weak absolutely delivered, with ensembles inspired by vintage MTV, scarecrows, aging goth/new wave/post-punk artistes, and more. Our scouts captured four of surfing’s fav fashionistas, looking suave as ever.…

A few months ago, I was on a surf trip to South Africa with a group of pros, and for reasons unknown, their cinematographer, Layne Stratton, frequently trained his lens on me when I stood up on a wave. At the end of the trip, Stratton sent me a reel of all my rides, which he’d captured on his ultra-high-definition camera. He thought he was doing me a favor, bless his heart. If you aren’t a professional surfer, whose livelihood depends on the constant improvement and refinement of your surfing ability, you probably don’t want to see yourself surf. There tends to be a disconnect between the way something feels in the water and the way it looks from the beach, and if you do see yourself surf, you’ll likely…

Surf fashion unquestionably peaked in the early ’60s. Canvas trunks, ruged denim jeans, white T-shirts, cable-knit sweaters, aloha shirts, and cheap leather slaps formed the typical surfer’s wardrobe. Those weren’t necessarily even stylistic choices when you think about it; that was just the most functional clothing of the time for a surfer. Over the next few decades, surf style became its own marketable genre of fashion, leading to highperformance boardshorts and rash guards stocked proudly in Midwestern malls, the 1,000-yard stares of surf stars peering at customers from surf-brand billboards in cities all over the world. And the farther in time surf style got from the ’60s, the more garish and chaotic it all became. Surf fashion went barreling off the rails toward hideous, bagy boardshorts, terrible prints on T-shirts,…

A few years ago, surfing my backyard break, I struck up a conversation with a guy who used to live in the neighborhood. Due to some bygone consequences that he preferred not to discuss, he was now stuck somewhere inland. He had grown doughy, and his skin was clammy white. His wetsuit stretched thin where it should have clung, bunched where it should have articulated. We chatted as he more draged than carried a garage-sale special under his arm. The waves were good, the sky blue—the first decent conditions we’d had in another fogy, toiling San Francisco summer. All the regulars were out—locals who surf twice a day, competently, and carry their status like a badge of honor. My new soft-serve acquaintance stroked into a head-high wedge that was about…

“Style is subjective.” We say it, but most of the time we’re just being polite. Everybody knows that the Style Fairy wasted precious little magic dust on Adriano de Souza, and none whatsoever on poor Glen Winton, while Tom Curren gets the stuff delivered weekly to his front door in a drum-size Sparkletts bottle. Pinpointing exactly why, and to what degree, de Souza is not Curren is a bit trickier. Style is like pornography in that sense: hard to define, but obvious nonetheless. You know it when you see it. Most of the time, anyway. Occasionally, maybe once a generation, a surfer will make a style claim so at odds with reigning flow lines and vortices that we actually don’t know it when we see it. Mark Richards flummoxed style…

Paging through Tom Adler’s An Uncommon Archive, you’re struck by the breezy beauty contained in the eclectic volume, ripe with delicious scraps from a career spent collecting photographs, illustrations, and paintings from a sprawling and celebrated list of contributors. For the project, Adler dove into this expansive archive, which he accrued working on hardbound photography books with the likes of Ron Church, Don James, and Jeff Divine, as well as designing titles like Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora, 180° South, The Eighties at Echo Beach, and The Stone Masters: California Rock Climbers in the Seventies. Adler selected from literally thousands of images found on hard drives, in scrapbooks, and elsewhere. The resulting collection is all dust and divinity, starlets and surfers, hardened adventurers and weathered, weary Americana.…

“For me, it’s all about surfing waves of consequence like they’re not waves of consequence. I don’t think anyone has any style when they’re just holding on, going straight. When you start to have control, and approach it like it’s just any other wave, that’s when you start showing signs of style.” [Albee Layer] On December 4, 1969, Greg Noll sat alone in the water at Makaha arguing with himself about what the odds were of actually surviving one of the massive waves freight-training down Kaena Point. Three storms had converged in the Gulf of Alaska, creating a 2,000-milelong wind fetch starting at the Aleutians and stretching nearly all the way to the North Shore. For three days, the Pacific throbbed with the bigest surf anyone had ever seen. And…