boil the ocean

The runaway success of the @whatpantsarethose Instagram account, the widely aped ‘Big Boy’ cut and Vincent Touzery’s steadily rising clout quotient all serve to remind one of the skateboard realm’s perennial truisms: Nothing, at all, is more important than pants. The stout-hearted merchants plying this multibillion-dollar opportunity know it, and live their lives. Name another commercial enterprise in which one can begin with a derelict ship sail or excess burlap and, with a few quick slices and the stroke of a threadsman’s needle, yield a product that can command a market premium while simultaneously shielding the user from municipal nudity fines. It is impossible.

For all their prowess and promise, pants remain earthly things, fouled by the same weaknesses, soot and worry that spread soreness in an aged knee, and wear away our pointiest mountain peaks. But the future can change. Electronic car personality Elon Musk recently predicted that AI will outwit all individual human beings in 2025, and all humans combined by 2029. Already, its powers are being calibrated for deployment within the skateboard sphere. Over in Florida, you have Gucci Mane caster Harmony Korine collabing with yung Sean Pablo on an emerging board concern dubbed ‘EDGLRD’ that aspires to splash workaday footage with artificially intelligent software that can reimage skaters’ bodies as scrawny alien creatures, amongst other possibles: 

Sean Pablo: Basically, we would be like skating and there’d be somebody in front, filming us from a car while we’re skating toward them. After it’s filmed, you can watch the clip of you skating down the street from any angle. From the bottom, or the top, it makes no sense. You could do a tre flip and then play it again and again from a different angle each time. It uses sonar or whatever to make a 3D rendering of the room, the environment or whatever. We haven’t even really scratched the surface of what we could do with skate videos.

But what about the pants? Fear not, for this past week, fisheye-slinging Supreme Svengali William Strobeck hinted at a future yet to come via ‘Late Nite Special’ spicing the timeworn zooms with colourful green-screen type flashes to add a sputtering psychedelia to some typically heavy clips from Tyshawn Jones as well as bros including Troy Gipson and Ben Kadow. Watching a shirt’s shifting plaid or the color of Troy Gipson’s hair rapidly flash across the rainbow, one is left wondering, what if it were for real? 

The technology already exists — University of Central Florida scientists described how they have developed an ‘etextile’ that can be controlled with a mobile telephone, producing tote bags, shoe uppers and furniture capable of shifting colours or patterns on demand. It may not be too early to imagine a world in which pants that can change colour in real time not only exist but are widely available, and how they may come to influence and impact skate footage. 

In this world, Vinny Ponte-style spot-to-fit matching is table stakes. Some will remember the older gods of the 1980s who learned from and lived the parables in the mythical Powell Peralta rider guide. On clothing, its teachings were specific: 

Don’t wear white. Better contrast is achieved with red, blue, fuschia, POWELL PERALTA shirts. Wear pants that contrast with the shirt, darker or lighter in color. Black, often times, doesn’t work as a shirt color. Be sure that you have several different shirts/sweatshirts/and jacket available to use. The more choices you have the more flexible the photographer can be.”

Will the coming decade bring pants that can change hue chameleon-like as the wearer backside tailslides a hubba, or flash brightly upon impact, or display animated patterns? Could Supreme and other premium pants vendors eventually shift to a subscription model in which proprietary patterns are uploaded to users’ downloadable fiber databases? Did Ty Evans over a decade ago anticipate Sean Pablo’s multidimensional filming aspirations via ‘Tha Skatrix’? Could customizable fibers be combined with the technology behind the ‘Back 2 Tha Future 2’ self-lacing Nikes to adjust fits on the fly, potentially making yet another Girl skit closer to reality?