Fashion 86 : Surf’s Up All Over the World in Wave of California Beachwear

If it looks familiar, that’s because it was here before--back in the ‘60s when the Beach Boys crooned “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and movie houses played “Gidget” and “The Endless Summer.” Suddenly surfing, aloha shirts, Bermuda shorts and “baggies” were in.

But the old days were a drop in the bucket. Now the scene, in surf vernacular, is “un-REAL.” Just about anybody with an ocean affiliation--and that includes the Beach Boys--has jumped into the fray, producing surf-related threads coveted from Malibu to Michigan, from Kansas to Kyoto.

What was once considered a kinky California fad has become a spirit and an attitude embraced around the world. Surf clothes, surf colors, surf logos, surf labels, surf paraphernalia and surf spinoffs (all sold in top department stores and beach-gear shops) are symbolic of a life that is freer, more daring than the norm. For the price of anything from a wild pair of trunks and a logo-laden T-shirt to a funky jacket and pair of baggy pants, the door to the sun culture opens.

From their offices situated primarily in Orange County, the young, entrepreneurial types of the beachwear business watch the shores that have spawned a $2-billion industry. They’re looking for the trends, they say, because once something gets too popular, the surfer drops it and moves on.

Surfers aren’t so sure that’s how it works. Many believe it’s clothing manufacturers like Quiksilver, Gotcha, Catchit, Billabong and Jimmy’z who set the trends by promoting with a vengeance.

Ken Seino, a surfer and part-time manager of the Natural Progression surf shop in Malibu, recalls that when one company was shooting for stardom a couple of years ago: “It started giving clothes to the coolest kids in school. It’s all in the promotion and marketing. It doesn’t even have to be functional.”

Reese Patterson, a semiprofessional surfer who works for Competition Surf and Sport in Redondo Beach adds: “The companies are really pushing the surfers and the industry. They’re having an influence on fashion. A lot of kids want to emulate the guys at the top, so if they see Shaun Tomson get out of the water and throw on a pair of Style Eyes (sunglasses), they want to throw on a pair of Style Eyes.”

Tomson, one of the world’s top professionals, is involved with more than just sunglasses. He appears in ads for his own clothing line, Instinct, and helps run the family store, Surfbeat, in Santa Monica.

Said by many to be on the cutting edge of surfing, the shop caters to the hard-core and those who just like the look. “Highway surfers,” brother Paul Tomson calls them. What they all buy, he says, “comes down to what the top 16 are wearing.”

Eddie Talbot, owner of E.T. Surfboards in Hermosa Beach, believes that ideally “surfing belongs in the water and fashion belongs in the street.” But he adds that the trendy, glossy side of surf wear has its advantages:

“Without these companies doing what they’re doing, there wouldn’t be enough money to support pro surfers. Before it would have been the board manufacturers; now, new doors have opened up. That means more exposure, which in the long run is better for the sport.”

Gotcha, a Coast Mesa-based firm run by Joel Cooper and former professional Michael Tomson (cousin to Saun and Paul Tomson), is typical of what’s happening in a young, hard-hitting industry. Starting off with little more than a yen to create better surf trunks, the pair went from zero in 1978 to a predicted $45-million gross in 1986.

Catering to the hard-core and hoping to attract the “urban surfer” with trunks, walking shorts, jackets, pants and T-shirts, the company makes sure its image is seen through high-powered advertising, rock concerts and sports involvements, such as the recent first-annual Gotcha Pro surf competition in Hawaii.

Ten years ago, surfer and USC graduate Bob McKnight started Quiksilver.

“I thought it would be a good way to make a buck and surf,” he jokes. Actually, he wanted to make better board shorts and went from that to action sportswear for toddlers to adults

Remaining faithful to the hard-core elite, the main thrust of the Tustin-based business is directed at 16-to-20 year olds. For that group, who are into the “cult trip,” the company makes “stickers, outrageous ads and videos,” McKnight says. “Our whole attack is outrageous, aggressive.”

That includes Quiksilver’s sponsorship of athletes, including “more than 500 surfers internationally at all different levels” and last year’s top three: surfer Tom Carroll, windsurfer Robby Naish and volleyball hero Karch Kiraly.

Catchit, which also makes clothing for women under the Haute Rush label, sponsors “a large number of sports people, including Glen Winton, the No. 3 rider in the world,” company president Ian Forman comments.

“It lends authenticity to your line. We believe we need to show the top professional is wearing our product. He gives us his opinion. If it can stand up to the rigorous workouts he puts it through, it can stand up to other people.”

Investor Louis Graziadio, who has been surfing for 30 of his 37 years, says he doesn’t pay much attention to labels or the hype attached to surf wear of the ‘80s. He has a half-dozen pairs of board shorts that he wears regularly, and of those he can easily recall only one brand: OP (Ocean Pacific).

Typically, he uses a wet suit most of the year in California, where water temperatures are cold. In Hawaii or the Caribbean, he brings out the trunks, which are always a short style “because they stay closer to the body, which keeps water and wind resistance down to a minimum.”

He can “generally tell who is a serious surfer and who is not by the way he dresses. The serious surfer is a little more conservative. If a guy is all decked out in Jimmy’z and colored tennis shoes, I would guess he’s a skateboarder. A lot of serious surfers aren’t all that interested in style, they’re much more interested in finding the surf.”

But it is a sport (and the “last outlaw culture,” says Michael Tomson) with some definite fashion history. Graziadio remembers his first pair of Takis--a pair of two-color walking shorts made locally by a seamstress who had a surfer son--as ‘the greatest thing in the world.”

Then there were what Graziadio calls “the very individualistic, antisocial” fashion statements made by legendary surfer Mickey Dora. “He wore far-out stuff like army trench coats, and because he was good, a lot of people emulated him.”

Many of today’s “far-out” clothes are made by men as colorful as their products. Jimmy Ganzer, of Jimmy’z fame, is a portly, ponytailed surfer as well as a highly accomplished painter and sculptor.

In two short years, Ganzer and partner Sepp Donahower have become the talk of the industry, with more than $30-million annual gross retail sales of clothing that transcends the surf scene.

Ganzer claims they are “filtering into St. Louis and Texas,” where skateboarders like the look. And one swanky specialty chain, he says, told him: ‘You fill a really interesting place for us. You fill a category where a young girl dresses up in your clothes and a wealthy woman dresses down.”’

Typical of the individuality associated with the industry, Jeff Yokoyama, the 31-year-old president and designer of Maui & Sons, refuses to give up his previous profession.

Although he and partner Steve Prested have taken their Irvine-based company from $28,000 5 1/2 years ago to $20 million this year, Yokoyama cuts hair one night a week at a salon in Corona del Mar “for the fun and the influence” it gives his work. He also surfs daily, takes acting classes and observes what colors the Italians, particularly Gianni Versace, are using in their collections.

Without color to draw attention to them, competitive surfers say they would be overlooked in a sea of many. Shawn Riley a 16-year-old amateur surfer who attends Santa Monica High School explains: “You want to be noticeable from the shore, not bizarre but noticeable. If you’re good and you’re wearing bright trunks or a bright wet-suit people will pick you out.”

Once you’re picked out, you could be sponsored and dressed, as Riley is by O’Neill, an industry leader in wet suits and sportswear.

Candice Woodward, a Manhattan Beach physical therapist who used to compete on a professional level, says she prefers pastel-colored wet suits now.

But if it were back in the days when she was “sponsored or in competitions, I would go for brighter colors so I would be seen.” When she’s not wearing a wet suit, she rides the waves in a one-piece swimsuit or a bikini “that I know will stay in place.”

Out of the water, Woodward opts for what she calls beachwear.

“But I stay away from a lot of the tropical prints,” she says, “because they’re just too stereotypical. I like the trendier, fresher things from Gotcha, Jimmy’z and Esprit, which I think has been influenced a lot by the surfing industry. I think Calvin Klein and Guess? have too.”

She not only likes the clothes, she likes what they have done for a life style she’s known since childhood:

“Surfing has always been a small subculture of teen-age kids or older nonconformist types. I think the clothing industry has exposed the general public to what it’s all about, which is a carefree, easy-going, adventurous life style.”

But for Steve Pezman, publisher of Surfer magazine, which is loaded with apparel advertisements, the industry explosion presents a dilemma.

A 45-year-old surfer, Pezman recalls: “In the early days, surfing was the antithesis of normal society. You made fun of society, and fashion was one of its more ludicrous aspects. Now suddenly fashion has engulfed surfing and made it its own.”

Surf shop owner Eddie Talbot adds: “Although the color of the hair has changed, the length of the shorts have changed and society’s attitude have changed, the feelings of surfing have always been and will always remain the same: the feelings of escape and oneness with nature.

“That’s very important, and we have to be careful we don’t lose that. It’s only the kid in the water having fun--and it could be a young kid or an old kid--who’s making this thing work.”