Various artifacts express the social milieu of these sports, from boards, hats, and T-shirts to fanzines, magazines, and commercial catalogs. Since the late 1980s, the skateboard industry has largely consisted of small, skater-owned companies who use members of their own skateboard teams to design product graphics. Mike Mills, a skateboarder and graphic designer, has described the transformation of skateboarding from a primarily white, suburban sport in the 1960s and 1970s to a multiracial urban phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s: "Skating's crossover to urban kids of color is part of a larger mixing between white kids listening to rap, rap musicians such as Ice-T playing heavy metal...and the cross influence between the New York homeboy and California skate/surf fashions." Mills described the hijacking of mainstream corporate logos as a "new critical materialism"--a reaction against the anti-consumer ethos of punk--that embraces a cycle of rapidly changing styles and symbols.

While young people living in the suburbs might choose to counter their affluent surroundings with an anti-consumerist stance, acts of conspicuous consumption provide urban young people with signs of status and a means to challenge common stereotypes about their buying power.

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© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum