Two Surf Companies, Two Different Skate Bets Two Australian surf companies spent the 1980s building global businesses on boardshorts and wetsuits, and when skateboarding's late-80s boom made a skate identity look worth having, only one of them tried to build that identity from scratch. Billabong launched Bad Billy's in …

Thrasher's Founding and the Media Infrastructure It Built By 1981, skateboarding in America had no dedicated publication built by skaters, for skaters, at the volume the culture actually operated at — and that gap is what Thrasher was built to fill. The magazine launched that year, published out of San Francisco by …

A Disembodied Hand That Defined a Decade A disembodied hand — five fingers splayed wide, a mouth opened mid-scream across the palm — arrived in skateboarding in 1985 and has never really left. Jim Phillips drew that image for Santa Cruz Skateboards, and the Screaming Hand became one of the most reproduced graphics in …

The Bicycle That Sat in the Background of Every Beach Photo Look at almost any photograph of a Southern California beach town between the late 1970s and the late 1980s and a particular bicycle keeps turning up at the edge of the frame: wide tires, a heavy curved frame, fenders, no gears worth mentioning, usually …

The Rider Was the Product In the 1980s skate industry, the deck under a kid's feet was rarely the thing being sold first. The thing being sold was a person — a pro skater whose name was on the board, whose graphic was the graphic, and whose style in a magazine sequence or a video part told the buyer what the brand …

A Format Nobody Expected to Sell When Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show in 1984, the company expected to sell about 300 copies on VHS. It sold 30,000. That gap — two orders of magnitude between the forecast and the result — is the whole story of how skate video became the dominant marketing medium of …

The Boom Was Built on a Bust The popular image of 1980s skateboarding — vert ramps, backyard halfpipes, street skaters grinding curbs in the suburbs — looks like a culture that chose the margins on purpose. In a sense it did, but the choice was forced. The reason skating moved out of purpose-built commercial parks and …

In 1986, on a plaza of granite ledges and brick gaps in front of the Embarcadero in San Francisco, Mark Gonzales ollied across a gap that no contest had a category for. There was no judging panel, no coping, no transition — just a flat run-up, a tap of the tail, and a jump cleared over a stretch of pavement that office …

Two skate tees sit on the same table. Both carry the same late-80s graphic, the same washed-soft hand, the same faded ring of a logo across the chest. One is an original run worth real money to a collector; the other is a reprint pressed twenty years later off a scanned art file. Nothing on the front separates them. …

"Sidewalk surfing" is the phrase that gives away the secret. Before skateboarding had a name of its own, it borrowed one — and the borrowing reveals exactly how the first generation of riders understood what they were doing. They were not playing a new sport. They were surfing on land, killing time between swells, …