Skateboarders Knock Clothes Down to Size

My god, they used to be big.

As skateboarders, we draped triple (XXXL), even quadruple (XXXXL) shirts over our scrawny frames. We taunted the clueless skaters wearing T-shirts that actually fit.

“Nice spandex,” we’d say.

Or if their pants were only two sizes too big, instead of eight to 10, we jeered at the poor fools in “spandex uniform.”

Now, and I’m only admitting this because someone paid me, we have begun wearing T-shirts that, even a regular person would say, fit. (Some might qualify as “tight.”) And our pants are running only two or three sizes too big; the legs still need plenty of room to move, so butt-huggers will never happen.

Skateboard apparel manufacturers attribute the downsizing to big clothes having gotten popular with the wrong crowd. And skaters don’t like being lumped in with any crowd. So these days an XL is as large as you can go in a T-shirt from Birdhouse and others.

The sad part of this story is that the non-skate world continues to mimic what we no longer wear. Huge companies still make goofy clothes that would be baggy on an NBA player. But that is their problem. Skateboarders have recovered rather nicely from the XXXL virus and now resemble a kid in a Norman Rockwell painting: baggy pants, scruffy hair, scraped elbows and tight shirts over scrawny frames. The eternal uniform of youth.