No sport has had more influence on contemporary fashion and style than surfing. Arguably basketball has impacted on street wear somewhat as well. Perhaps baseball a teensy bit too. Of course soccer shirts have long been somewhat of a fashion statement. Golf and tennis, on the other hand, have had no impact what so ever on contemporary fashion… that is unless you are a golfer or tennis player who likes wearing your daggy outfits when you aren’t even playing your sport.
Surfing styles and fashions have changed radically over the years from the straight-legged white levi jeans and club jackets of the early sixties, through the counter-culture inspired flares and long hair of the seventies, into the colourful eighties and on and on from generation to generation, but its ability to influence what young people wear has never wavered. Sometimes surfing styles evolved over a decade or a generation. At other times styles changed overnight. Check out the images below where the same surfers are compared almost from one year almost to the next. Most of these images show how the surfers adapted to new fashions and styles between 1966 and 1970. Incidentally, not only did this period reflect the emergence of facial hair, long hair, flares jeans and loose fitting tops the surfers were also adopting new ways of surfing as well. As surfers added inches to their hair styles they cut dozens of inches off their surfboards and completely changed their approach to their surfing.
Check out these famous surfers of the sixties and seventies and see how much they changed in just a year or two!
Rusty Miller
Nat Young
David Nuuhiwa
Robert Hynson
Wayne Lynch
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