On Things Changing
I thought of the nugget at the centre of this post a few weeks ago and have been kicking it around since. Bear with me as I try to dig through my brain to find the idea that spurred this by writing through it, as is my custom.
I find that one of the most frustrating things in life is when things change and you have no control over it. Something that was once ~important~ and then, through no effort on your behalf, it becomes the opposite. Human beings are kind of obsessed with controlling things and classifying things. People get terrified and irate when something happens to them and there's nothing they can do about it. They get equally mad when something is easy to pin down as "this, this, and this". Saves the Day has to be "emo" and "pop-punk" and you have to mention that they were sort of a hardcore before discussing any of their current music which doesn't resemble any of those things.
This desire to classify things is a weird quirk of humanity and I think about it a lot. I'm fully aware of it and I still try to stick things into their proper place more than almost everyone else. Maybe it's due to how we're educated in public school systems? That is a meandering thought for another time.
Back to writing about the amorphous topic of "things changing".
The thing that spurred me to write about is the current fad of young teenagers wearing Thrasher Magazine merchandise. You may scoff at this being what inspired this, but I really do think it's an excellent example of it.
I've been very familiar with Thrasher for most of my life because skateboarding and punk are basically the first two things I got into while I was shaping my identity in the crucial pre-teen, pre-high school years. The tie between those two subcultures is almost as old as either of them are and makes perfect sense. Skateboarders have been into punk forever and nothing exemplifies this relationship better than Thrasher Magazine. I was drawn to Thrasher magazine because the style of skating they featured in the mag was punk. Even if it wasn't a punk guy skating, the ethos was there. It was anti-corporate and praised just skating over everything else. As simple as that sounds, it's fucking huge.
This is why I was so proud to wear my Thrasher shirt and hoodie while I was out and, especially, while I was skating.
Over the last year or so, Thrasher shirts (especially the "Flame Logo") have BLOWN up as popular clothing choices for hip teens, which was, to me, very surprising. It's to the point now where most people think of Thrasher as a streetwear brand like Supreme or Crooks and Castles, which kind of sucks. Are the shirts not made to express your endorsement of the mag and its ethos?
There was one day I was coming home from work and there was a group of freshmen university students on the streetcar near me. All of them were very excited because their OSAP student loans had all just gone through and they had just spent the surplus on some new Thrasher shirts, despite non of them being skateboarders. It was sad to see. That is pretty silly to say, but IMU only exists for me to be frank, so I'm not going pretend I wasn't bummed out by this to save face.
I've thought about whether it's dumb and shitty for Thrasher gear to have gotten so popular a lot for the last little while and I think I've mostly settled on what I think about.
A big part of this was listening to an episode of the excellent skateboarding podcast The Bunt on which Thrasher Editor-in-Cheif Jake Phelps was a guest. The hosts asked Phelps about the phenomenon and how he felt about Thrasher shirts somehow becoming a fashion trend. Phelps, who is well-known in skateboarding as its foremost cantankerous gatekeeper, said that he didn't care at all about celebrities like Bieber and Rihanna wearing the brand because all it did was drive up sales and give the magazine more money, which in turn allowed them to send even more skaters on more skate trips and put out even more videos. I thought that was a great way to look at this trend.
I still think it's pretty silly to buy and wear a shirt that says "Thrasher Magazine" when you don't read or care about the mag though.
I know that this is going to be a short-lived thing and I'm sure that those damn teens will have moved on to something else clothes-wise next year, but part of me is still a little sour that something that I really love got picked up to be a trend so divorced from what it means. There was one day where I skateboarded to work in my Thrasher hoodie and when my co-workers (who are all insular studio art kids) saw me they said "Oh aren't you just the broiest bro!" because they clearly understood Thrasher as "Thing That "Hip Teens" Wear" and not "Skateboarding Magazine".
I think my obsessive on this is mostly due to the fact that now when I wear my Thrasher t-shirt, people will think "that is a popular brand" and not "he loves to skateboard". I liked it better when a Thrasher shirt was a signifier for somebody who fucking loves to skate. I love skateboarding and I hate brands. I hate that this small thing that was important to me changed drastically and there was nothing I could do about it. I also hate that I care so much about what people think about t-shirts.
I guess that from now on, I'll just have to make sure to be skateboarding whenever I wear my hoodie to remove all doubt and that's not the worst thing in the world because any excuse to get outside and skate is a good one.
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