Slater chose as collaborators seasoned insiders (Julie Gilhart, the former fashion director of Barneys New York Stella Ishii, the woman instrumental in nurturing brands like Alexander Wang, 3.1 Phillip Lim and the Row) whose selection telegraphed the intentions of a man who claims to have known from the very first surf contest he entered that he was destined to win. Yet the decision to part with Quiksilver, long in coming, and the later partnership with Kering were part of a strategy to build a brand with lofty ethical goals, one that deployed his renown without turning him into what he called “a fame whore,” one whose nominal cornerstones are “style, sustainability and travel.”įrom the start, Mr. Slater abruptly quit a lucrative endorsement deal with the surf wear behemoth Quiksilver last year on the cusp of April Fools’ Day he’d had the gig, after all, since he was 18. Slater’s lifestyle, his determined yet laid-back manner and how it emblematizes a lucrative sector of the clothing market (luxury and sports-lifestyle) that made him appealing to Kering, the global conglomerate behind Gucci, Balenciaga, Stella McCartney and Bottega Veneta, and now him. Ready-to-wear hardly encompasses the full Outerknown brief, although the vaporous rubric of “lifestyle brand” is not much better. Slater, who was in town to preview his latest venture, a line of ready-to-wear clothing called Outerknown. “It’s nothing for me to get on a plane to the other side of the world,” said Mr. Slater or anyone else engaged in the world’s most peripatetic line of work. Depending upon whim and global surf reports, he may impulsively hop a jet tomorrow and head to Australia. He alighted briefly in New York from his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla., on a rare mild day during a bitter East Coast winter. “I’m the one that has to deal with the outcome,” Mr. He is also, as it happens, a two-handicap golfer.Īnd there is more logic to that than you may at first imagine because in golf, as in surfing, every choice is a matter of personal responsibility. He became the first surfer ever to earn two perfect scores in a two-wave scoring system, a feat he first accomplished in 2005 in the final heat of the Billabong Pro Tahiti contest at Teahupo’o and repeated in June 2013, at an age when most pro athletes have long since given up sports that provoke adrenaline surges powerful enough that fear becomes its own agent for duffer activities like golf. He has been named World Tour Champion a record 11 times, winning five of those titles consecutively from 1994 to 1998. Slater became the most decorated surfer in history. If Zen deliberation is not often associated with the sport that gave us Gidget and cowabunga and viral beat-down videos from Oahu’s gorgeous, lawless North Shore and also decades of glossy, vaguely pornographic images of men sluiced like little gametes through lubricious curling tubes, then that may explain why Mr. He imagines his last memory of water might be a moment when he is towed into an 80-foot monster he anticipates will take him out.Īnd that would be a good death, said Kelly Slater, the American pro surfer who has spent most of his 43 years in an element that once held terror for him, a fear he not only managed but subdued in the surprising way he seems to do most things, by careful study. His first childhood memory of water is of being held beneath the surface until he thought he would drown.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |