“Skateboard,” a New Exhibition at London’s Design Museum, Tracks the Sport’s Stylistic and Cultural Evolution Over 75 Years

Few sporting cultures have influenced fashion as heavily as skateboarding. It’s rare for a season to pass without some wink, nod, or homage to the midcentury California-born pastime (and, as of 2020-turned-2021, Olympic category). Currently, for example: Gucci offered up skateboard bags on the runway in Seoul for its Cruise 2024 collection. Chopova Lowena showed Spring 2024 in a skatepark, with aesthetics nodding to “the skater boy you love.” Of his Spring 2024 concept, Bluemarble’s Anthony Alvarez said he has always been intrigued by California’s skate culture and its “forever young mindset.” Even Miu Miu, recently crowned the hottest brand in the world by the Lyst Index, showed ultra-low riding chino pants and baggy shorts–silhouettes that have long been associated with skatewear–on its latest runway. 

More than most, the sport is a catwalk mainstay. And now, its three-quarter century history is being examined through a neatly conceived and tightly edited exhibition called Skateboard, supported by Converse, at London’s Design Museum. A book by the same name is being released by Phaidon in tandem.

Skateboard examines the fundamentality of its namesake device. The show is an object study at its core; it tracks the backstory of the board across generations’ worth of iterations (one 2000’s deck features baroque squiggles called “money shapes” on its edge, for instance). Yet it also provides a crisp, clear flow of the world-building that has occurred around the apparatus.

Over 100 chronologically advancing decks, their widely varied graphics, images sourced from over 40 photographers in multiple decades, and spin-off ephemera (such as zines and decals) illustrate this rise of skateboarding not only as an athletic discipline but also as an aspirational lifestyle. A 1960s-era Life cover, for example, shows a woman in neat white trousers riding against a big blue sky–while doing a handstand on her board, no less.