Skateboarding has faced its golden era. It was introduced to the public through collaborations with high fashion brands and captivated the young with its charming culture. This worldwide phenomenon is reaching out to Korea as the global skateboard brand Supreme plans to foray into the country this year. Therefore, the Sungkyun Times (SKT) will explore skateboarding, which was once a subculture but, is now greatly loved by its fans around the globe.
History of Skateboarding
The roots of skateboarding trace back to Californian surfers in the 1950s, who attached wheels to their boards to “surf” on the ground when the tides were not strong enough. As skateboarding culture originated from surfers with a hippie lifestyle, a spirit of hostility and resistance exists as its backbone. Until the 1960s, skateboarding usually took place on flat ground in the format of a speed race. However, after the development of polyurethane wheels, trucks, and larger deck sizes in the 1970s, it began to focus more on tricks rather than racing. Moreover, skater Alan Gelfand first invented skateboarding tricks in 1976. In terms of popularity, skateboarding has steadily gathered a solid fan base since the 1950s, allowing diverse fans to merge their interests with skateboarding. Naturally, this led to its integration with different industries. The culture’s steady growth reached its peak in the 2000s as the number of skaters reached over 70 million. Subsequently, such developments of publicity and techniques in modern skateboarding induced the sport’s official enrollment in the 2018 Jakarta Palembang Asian Games and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Prosperity of Skateboarding Culture
-Rise in Popularity through Videos
Skateboarding culture pursues artistic and aesthetic values. Thus, many skaters exhibit their vibrant tricks and skating styles by filming them. Subsequently, video recordings of professional skaters in distinctive styles emerged, creating a new film genre: Skate Film. These videos go further from merely showing boarding tricks and their styles. Skate films also deliver the lifestyle of skaters, the process of creating tricks, and the messages underneath the culture. Another characteristic of these films is that they contain skaters’ journeys to find the perfect spot to show off their tricks in the streets. Meanwhile, its video techniques and equipment do not follow modern trends. Most skate films are recorded with the DCR-VX1000 that Sony released in 1995, unlike modern videography that is filmed in extremely high quality, mostly in 4K or even 5K. It allows the film to hold a unique, nostalgic aura through vintage color palettes and grainy pixels. The reason for such a setting in quality is related to the rebellious attitude at the roots of the sport’s culture. A successful example of this is Dogtown and Z-Boys, released in 2001. The film successfully delivered the essence of boarding culture and a skater’s unchained lifestyle, captivating the young generation yearning to escape from the restraints of society.
-Fashion and Skateboarding
As skateboarding shares its origins with surfing, it absorbed surfers’ customs of opening fashion brands to express their culture and lifestyle. Hence, skateboard brands such as Vans not only sell clothing but exhibit the culture through artworks and slogans. The most famous example is the slogan “OFF THE WALL,” which captivated American hippies in the 1960s who were indignant toward society after the Vietnam War. Since then, skateboard brands have expressed a cultural message through their products. Furthermore, they have collaborated with artists and allowed them to use skateboard decks as a canvas that embodies their identity, reinforcing the connection between art and skateboarding. Based on the fan base built from such marketing, skateboard brands gained huge popularity from the general public with the early 2000s fashion trend: the vintage and grunge style popularized by the Japanese fashion brand Number (n)ine. Moreover, skateboard brands now thrive as mass culture reached its peak in the 2017 fall Louis Vuitton show, as fashion showcases of collaboration with Supreme earned praise from both the public and critics. It was a representation that skateboarding brands and the prosperity of their culture had escalated.
Skateboarding Culture in Korea
Skateboarding was first introduced to Korea in the 1980s but only began to receive attention in the 2000s. However, its culture has been facing many obstacles ever since. First, there are not enough skate spots in Korea, so many skaters find it hard to find the right places. Moreover, South Korea’s representative skate spot X-GAME (CULT) even faced the danger of demolition twice. Even so, the chronic issues of skate spots came from noise pollution, littering, and unmannered behaviors of some skaters. Thereby, skaters must make an effort to gain society’s support on their playgrounds. “Along with the need for more boarding spots, Korea needs more skate films that can promote its culture and communicate with the public,” said the director of the Korean skateboard brand Labros, Paul Jung, in an interview with the SKT. Although skate films are not widely popular in Korea, there are successful Korean skate teams like Carhartt WIP Skate Korea or Labros that have created impressive films. In fact, a bright future for Korean skateboarding culture awaits with the arrival of the global skateboard brand Supreme and the emergence of domestic skateboard brands showing off their unique culture.
Skateboarding is impressive in many aspects. It received massive love all around the world with its strong artistic and rebellious values and became an official sport in the Olympics. Will Korea be the next to follow the prosperity of skateboarding culture like in many other parts of the world? As the weather is getting warmer, the SKT suggests Kingos visit Hangang River Park and start skateboarding.