Styles change.

Style doesn’t.

I saw this ad campaign by ...Lost in Surfing Magazine paired with an iconic shot of Chris Ward. It resonated with me then and it’s stuck with me ever since. The rest of the ad is a bit blurry, but it was basically saying that trends come in for a hot minute and then it’s on to the next and the former are gone. But there are certain things that always seem stand the test of time, and that’s no trend.

That’s style. True, timeless genuine style.

I’ve been a victim of some pretty bad trends over the years. I won’t sell myself out here, but I’ll just say I have my guilty pleasures like the rest of us, but I still find myself learning, perhaps now more than ever, just how much good style is always on trend. Whether it be fashion, music or surfing.

When I first started surfing I didn’t really understand style whatsoever. I don’t think I even knew it was a thing when I very first began. My take was that you wanted to go as fast as you could and hit a section as hard as you could. I’m sure it wasn’t pretty for a while, but once I got deeper into surfing and started getting my subscription to Surfing Magazine, I obsessed over all the photos and found myself trying to emulate different elements of people’s style. Bruce’s limp wrists and no-grab backside barrels, Taj’s viscous backhand attack, Ross Williams had so much finesse and threw huge fans of spray, the list goes on…I tried to morph my style into some type of a concoction of all of my studies. These days I’m learning more than ever and always trying to apply what I’m seeing, but more and more my research takes me deeper into the past.

Kai Neville describes this perfectly in the new episode of Style Matters. “Growing up being a subject of progressive surfing, you probably didn’t get Occy, and then you get older and you go, ‘Fuck, Occy’s the sickest’. You just become a bit wiser and realize how hard certain things are.”

There are lots of surfers of today that have incredible style, and most likely they build their foundation of style from surfers that came before them. While today’s surfers are innovating in a way that was never imagined way back, they are the modern representation of that style that does not change. Thomas Campbell references the perfect evolution of style is seen in Gerry Lopez, to Machado, to Craig Anderson. I couldn’t agree more. Gerry describes his own style and how it’s evolved into where it is today, illustrating it as “just a lot of standing around these days”.

I this episode of Style Matters, Gerry Lopez, Kai Neville and Thomas Campbell discuss the evolution of style.

I’m working hard to standing around a lot more these days too. It sure beats the hell out of being in a rush.—Brandon Guilmette