Critical Thinking

“I can’t stand the vocabulary. ‘He ticked all the boxes.’ ‘He’s at the business end of the heat.’ ‘He got a lot of work done.’ Fuck that! It’s a performance! Can you stop describing work?—Brad Gerlach on the competitive commentary. (For full Gerr effect, view the clip in episode 4 of our Style Matters series below.)

We spend a good amount of time being critical around here. Sometimes it feels like our job. Someone’s gotta make sure surfing and surf culture don’t get too sterile, formulaic or corporate. But I’d like to change the tone, because today we celebrate! August is over!

For those of you following along at home, I don’t like August (damn, I’m already being critical!). So it being September 1 I am celebrating with positivity and a Pau Hana beer. The breezes are cooler. The waves are bumping up. Football, Santa Anas and Halloween are on the horizon! My fullsuit can already feel the water drop coming! Oh, and some other weird end of August news went through. As of yesterday, August 31, Authentic Brands Group completed the purchase of Quiksilver, Billabong, RVCA, Element, DC and Honolua where they will join Volcom and a bunch of other brands as licensees. What exactly that all means for them and us and you remains to be seen, but maybe we all celebrate our independence by buying a new Inherent Bummer tee and hat? Got the new eel tee and hoodie up in the store today and restocked the “It’s not the end of the world” hat. Seems like a good enough reason to us.

Anyway, back to not being critical. Today we are celebrating both the end of August and style. For the past six months or so we’ve been releasing a four-part series in collaboration with Vissla on why Style Matters. The feedback and dialogue it created is just what the surf doc ordered.

We had some pretty heavy hitters contribute — Gerry Lopez, Craig Anderson, Kai Neville, Thomas Campbell and Brad Gerlach. The result has been an online party of why style is extra important these days and it made us all realize that maybe surfing of the competitive variety is to blame for our style regression. It’s been forcing even the most talented and stylish surfers to clock in and get scores at the expense of the performance. Remember Pina?! Riding waves is an artistic performance, even when you got a Bud Surf tour rashguard on. Let’s push to implement this in the criteria.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the conversations that the series has started and now we’re down to the fun part: watching surfing. Submissions are closing over the weekend and we get to dig through all the waves and narrow it down to the most stylish waves of the year — which we’ll of course share in a few weeks. Why don’t we celebrate style together in the meantime by watching all four episodes and hitting the #visslastylematters hashtag with a wave or two of your own? We’ll let a few entries from this weekend sneak in. And don’t worry, I won’t be too critical…it’s September 1st!—Travis Ferré

[Above artwork: Robert Rauschenberg, Stone Roll (Urban Bourbon), 1995]