This is a post about the trends in skateboarding shoes over the past 20 or so years. These are my reflections and my opinions on the industry and what drove the trends. All of the images in this post were found via google searches and are not my own.
Skateboarding is not a sport. Most skaters will agree with this as there are many aspects of this activity that separate it from traditional sports. While it takes athletic skill to skate well, skateboarding is far too unconstrained to be considered a sport. There are no rules. What you do or create on your board is skateboarding regardless of if people recognize it or think it’s cool. This abstractness is my favorite aspect of skating. Believe it or not, most skaters consider skateboarding to be more of an art form than a sport.
Fashion is strongly related to skating because skateboarders are creative people who embrace the ways in which our clothing can set ourselves apart from those who cannot understand our drive and passion. Many of the societal movements such as punk or hip hop culture were strongly embraced by skaters, who could often relate on a deeper, personal level to the ideas behind the fashion, more than those who just thought they would look cool in the clothes.
A crew of Philadelphia skaters at Love Park, an iconic skate spot during the 90's. Pictured are several pro's including Josh Kalis and Stevie Williams
Skateboarding itself has changed and adapted in a way that mirrors certain aspects of these cultural movements. For example, during the early 90’s, skateboarding looked much different than it does today. Hip hop was at its strongest point and skaters in New York were leading the charge in influencing what kinds of tricks were cool to skaters. During this time, people moved away from the “pool skating” that was big in the California scene and more closely related to the rock and roll movement. It was no longer important to show how high you could air out of a pool as it had all been seen before. With skating on the east coast taking off, the focus became on how stylish you could be while doing very complicated tricks. The more complicated the trick, the more skaters loved it.
DC Shoe ad for legend Mike Carroll.
In order to accomplish this, the skateboards of the 90’s had wheels that were about 20% smaller than the wheels of today in order to flip the board more quickly due to a much smaller moment of inertia (seen below). While the flips became quicker, skating became slower due to the smaller wheel radii. Speed became less important and what was focused on was the technical precision of the skating.
Tailslide by skate innovator and legend Brian Lotti
The shoes of the time mimicked this change in technique. The simple shoes were seen as too “old school” and shoemakers realized this change in perception. The most popular companies of the time, such as éS, Osiris, and DC Shoes, started adding as many frills to the shoes as possible, maximizing their visual complexity. The shoes got puffier, and the more padded your shoes were, the better. Along with this, Basketball sneakers were blowing up in the hip hop scene, and skaters started to pick up on this, and take inspiration from these designs. Below are a few examples of some very popular skate shoes when I first started skating in the early 2000's.
Clockwise from top left. eS Koston 3, Globe Fusion, Osiris D3, eS Scheme, Emerica Ellington, DC Williams
After a while, people got tired of very technical tricks on extremely low curbs, and skating began to change again. A shift began from “Fresh to Hesh” (“Hesh“ being the uncaring, aggressive and brash attitude relating to the Germanic, Hessian soldiers of the past.) The popular way of skating now was who could jump down the largest set of stairs, the largest gap or who could slide the largest handrail.
Ali Boulala's 25 stair ollie attempt in Flip Skateboards "Sorry" video
This form of skating relied heavily on impact dissipation and absorption. Because heel bruising was common with large vertical drops, air bubbles in the heels became a must. At this point, almost all of the padding went to the bottom of the shoe, not the sides and tongue. New innovative gels were experimented with to dissipate this energy, but the air bubble remained.
This ollie speaks for itself
Today, skateboarding has become a kind of combination of these two forms of skating. People are now doing incredibly technically impressive tricks, down huge stair sets or along giant handrails. You might think that skate shoes would again move back to the “technically complex” shoes but with more padding, but you would be wrong. Skate shoes now are very simple, low profile with almost no padding whatsoever. What explains this change?
Brazillian skateboarder Rodrigo TX kickflipping into a noseslide in France
What happened in the time between the early 2000’s and the present seems complicated but after some careful thought, fairly logical. One reason people started moving away from the large “moon boot” types of shoes, was that hip hop was starting to die down as the all-encompassing culture surrounding this countries youth. Indie Rock was beginning to come back in a big way and the large shoes with a bounty of gizmos began to look dated.
Another one of the biggest changes in the skate scene was that now, much of the world was also skateboarding, and doing it very well. European and Brazilian skateboarder’s shoes were influenced by different factors than Americans. Mainly; soccer. Their skate shoes looked more like indoor soccer shoes because that what they were. These shoes were desirable for their increased feel of the board and lightness. This form of shoe seemed more like an extension of ones feet as opposed to puffy foot protectors so popular in the states. Materials had also progressed in this time frame, and impact absorption was now much better understood. Manufacturers had come to the conclusion that air bubbles don’t really work due to their sensitivity to temperature changes and constant flexing of a reletively non resiliant membrane. As a result, air bubbles were completely eliminated from all skate shoes. Today, visual simplicity is the driving trend dominating the scene. Here are some of the popular skate shoes of today.
Clockwise from the top left: Lakai Griffin, Nike SB Dunk Hi Pro, Emerica The Reynolds Vulc Lo, Huf Choice, Nike SB Janowski, Adidas Busenitz Vulc
The next trends in the world of skate shoes will be driven by next round of changes to the skatboarding scene. They obviously have yet to be created. I believe that with increased use of 3D modeling, the next generation of skate footwear will begin to move again toward a more technical yet more restrained style of shoe. I believe color ways will begin to become bolder, and the materials will continue to improve with the help of material science.
