The Garment List

The trousers come in denim, cotton twill or canvas, and the weight runs from seven ounces to fourteen. The tee is cotton, printed on the chest, and sized a good deal past the shoulder. The hooded sweatshirt goes over it and gets sized up to match. The shoe is flat and low, in suede at the top of the range and canvas at the bottom. A cap or beanie covers the head. A flannel shirt goes over the top in the cold, open, or ties round the waist.

Everything above the ankle is cut around one move, your knee coming up past your waistband. You want the rise high enough that it stays put while you move, with enough room in the thigh for it to fold. The leg holds one width the whole way down to a hem past 18 inches around, long enough to stack on your shoe. The top gets sized up for the same reason: a tee cut close across the shoulders stops the arms.

Where the Clothes Came From

The first teams rode flat ground in board shorts and striped shirts, straight out of surfing. Long trousers turned up once skating moved into pools and ditches. A California drought in the mid-1970s left backyard pools empty, and the Dogtown crew rode them. GOAT's history of the period credits that Zephyr team with pulling jeans in for protection as the ground got rougher. Flannel and loose chinos came in with them, borrowed from Los Angeles Cholo dress, the Mexican-American street uniform of pressed chinos and open flannel. Punk arrived at the end of the decade with its own hardware.

Every item has stayed for a physical reason. Denim survives being dragged across concrete. Flannel comes off mid-session and goes round your waist without a bag, loose chinos fold at the knee, the hood covers early mornings at an empty lot. A cap keeps your hair out of your eyes while you are looking down.

Flat low shoeThesupermade High Street Skateboard Couple Shoes -1479$61.58

Suede goes across the outside edge and the toe of the shoe, where a dragging foot lands and where the cheaper canvas gives out first.

What Each Pair Is Made Of

What the skate brands print on their own product pages, this shop included, with an ordinary 501 at the bottom for comparison.

Ripstop names a weave. The base cloth can be nylon, polyester or cotton. Thicker yarns go in at intervals of five to eight millimetres in both directions, and the grid they make is the check you can see against the light. It does not stop a tear starting. It stops one spreading past the next reinforcing thread. The technique came out of wartime parachute work and reached civilian outdoor gear through the sixties.

An ounce per square yard works out to 33.9 grams per square meter, putting Polar's 435 at 12.8 ounces against the plain 501 at 12.9. The two Vans entries are a different pair of trousers each: the baggy at 49.5 centimeters works out to 19.5 inches, an inch wider than the loose at 18.5. One shop printed one figure in metric and the other in imperial.

Reinforcement Is Not Durability

Eleven skate trousers and a plain 501 to check them against, six different fiber contents between them. Five carry some reinforcement and six carry none. The five split across four approaches, two of them sharing the same doubled knee.

Rank them by reinforcement and you get a clean order, doubled knees and blended nylon at one end, plain cotton at the other. Durability will not sort them at all. Abrasion resistance comes off the yarn count, the spinning method, the weave density and the finishing. None of the twelve product pages carries any of those. They stop at composition, weight and hardware. The only finish named anywhere is moisture wicking. Weight is the closest any of them get to the question.

Three of the published weights land between 12.8 and 14 ounces. The Dickies double knee, the most reinforced trouser here, is 7.25-ounce twill, the thinnest base cloth on the list by a distance. Sew a second layer of it across the knee and you land near 14.5 ounces at the knee. Neither Dickies page names the fabric in that second layer. The 14.5 stays arithmetic. Dickies sells the same 7.25-ounce 65/35 twill through its workwear line, and the wholesale sheet a uniform buyer orders from lists the fabric as 7.25-ounce Temp IQ twill and the blend as 65 percent polyester, 35 percent cotton, both entered under Body. Nowhere on the sheet is there a second line for the knee, only a description of the doubled panel as reinforcement designed to take knee pads.

ASTM D4966 runs a Martindale head over the cloth until the yarns break and reports the count in thousands of cycles. Commercial upholstery is usually quoted at a floor of 20,000 cycles. Published figures for cotton and poly-cotton in that range disagree between suppliers by a factor of ten.

Who Makes the Reinforced Pairs

The reinforced pairs are the Dickies double knee, two from Nike SB and two from Levi's Skateboarding. All five come from companies that were making other clothes first. Dickies opened in 1922 selling overalls. Nike SB and Levi's Skateboarding run dedicated skate lines with their own teams, and each sits inside a company built on sportswear or on denim.

Dickies has sold the 874 work pant since 1967, 8.5-ounce twill in the same 65/35 blend, at 24.99 to 27.99 dollars. The skate-line double knee is 7.25 ounces of the same blend at 49.99. Lighter cloth, twice the money, one extra panel. A doubled knee is one more cut piece and one more pass under the needle, an operation a work-trouser factory has been running for a century. Ripstop already sits in a sportswear company's fabric bank. Blending Cordura nylon into denim wants a standing relationship with a mill.

Two of the brands on the list are skater-owned. Polar was started in 2011 by the Swedish professional Pontus Alv, Dime in Montreal in 2005 by two skaters filming their own clips. They work from a different set of assets: the name, the cut, and a customer who trusts them. So they buy good plain denim and charge at the top of the band.

Why the Trousers Are Wide

TrousersVintage Faded Wide Barrel Jeans$75.03

An ollie folds your knee up towards your chest, and the cloth has to come with it. A leg cut close stops the movement at the thigh. How much room a knee needs stays the same whatever the fashion does. The trade measures that room at the hem: one European retailer tells shoppers the leg opening is how you compare one baggy pant against another, and JNCO, the nineties baggy-jeans label, puts the inches straight into the product name.

The number is taken before the garment has been washed. Sanforizing, a process from the 1920s, holds shrinkage to around one percent, and most denim on sale has been through it. The shrink-to-fit 501 has not. Levi's makes that pair, and its own page tells buyers to expect about ten percent shrinkage on the first wash, and to buy one to three inches larger at the waist and three to four longer in the leg to allow for it.

Wide, Narrow, Wide Again

The width of a skate trouser has a trade definition behind it. The denim business puts wide leg at twenty inches or more round the hem, with the leg keeping its width all the way down, and a flare below the knee putting a pair in another family altogether. Skate trousers in the nineties went well past twenty. The Vines Supply's account of the period records leg openings past fifty inches at the far end of it. Through the 2000s skate trousers narrowed to a slim and sometimes tapered cut while the shoes flattened out and lost their padding, and photographs from the two decades look like two different subcultures who happen to buy the same shoe brands. The 2020s went back to volume without going back to fifty inches.

JNCO still sells the nineties silhouette, still naming each pair by its hem, from 20 inches up to 30. Its denim is 14-ounce 100 percent cotton on a 3x1 left-hand weave, the same cloth at the same weight as the Vans Check-5, whose hem measures 18.5 inches.

The Outfit by Decade

The six items mean something only once they are on one body together. Four sets are documented well enough to lay out, one for each turn the shape took.

	Trousers	Upper body	Feet	Leg opening on record
Mid-1970s	Board shorts to start, then jeans pulled in for protection, with loose chinos borrowed from Los Angeles Cholo dress	Striped shirts out of surfing, flannel worn open or tied at the waist	Flat, low, canvas	none
Mid-1990s	Wide leg, sold and named by the hem	Graphic tee two sizes up	Flat, low, suede	past fifty inches at the far end
2000s	Slim, sometimes tapered	The same tee, cut smaller	Flatter still, padding gone	none
2020s	Back to volume	Printed tee, hooded sweatshirt, cap	Flat, low, suede or canvas	18.5 to 19.5 inches on the two Vans pairs

The flannel arrived in the 1970s and the printed tee in the 1990s, neither of them changing shape since.

The Print

Printing a skateboard is a harder job than printing a shirt. The deck is curved, the print area is fixed, and the ink goes on by heat transfer.

Point Distribution has been pressing blank decks and printing them for brands out of Las Vegas since 2004. Its own guide says a spot-color transfer needs one screen per color, with a full board coming out best when the artwork holds to one or two solid colors. Digital transfer wins on price as soon as a design wants shading or a long list of inks. Gradients are out, along with photographic detail and anything that leans on a soft edge. The prints that survive it are heavy outline, filled shape, and lettering readable at speed from ten feet away.

Printed teeOil Painting Graphic Tee$49.65

Those same limits show up on the chest: flat print in one or two colors, edges that stop dead. A slogan tee written for strangers to understand belongs to some other category. The subjects repeat too: a brand mark, a team rider, a piece of borrowed Americana bent slightly out of shape, a joke aimed inward at people who already get the reference.

What the Term Covers Now

Wikipedia's page on skateboarding styles opens by separating riding style from the way skateboarders dress. The second meaning has come loose from the first, and now gets used on its own. The skate trousers listed earlier are the word doing a second job, as a product-line label. A line label makes a checkable claim about one specific garment and stays a claim about that garment.

Hooded sweatshirtStudded Streetwear Hoodie$44.95

This shop sells the style. The About page names skate among the scenes the brand came out of. The clothes are cut to that geometry in cotton. If you are going to fall in them, look for a reinforced knee. On this list that is the 49.99-dollar Dickies.

My Read

Skater style is a shape with a durability story stuck to it. The story was true in the seventies, when the clothes got picked up for protection.

Polar publishes a weight, a zipper brand and the position of the embroidery, and says nothing about what the cloth survives. The Dickies page gives a doubled knee at 49.99 dollars. Somewhere along the way, printing the engineering turned into a signal that a big company made the trousers.

A hundred dollars on plain cotton denim is buying a name. Names are worth money inside skating.

Common Questions