Chapter: 4
Ten-Year Boom
- Gidget the All-Powerful
- The Rebel Next Door
- Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS
- Better Surfing Through Chemistry
- Summer on the Inside
- Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted
- Surfing the Newsstand
- Process of Elimination
- Oil City Showdown
- The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards
- Technicolor Surf Boom
- Heroes and Villains
- Blackball Blues
- Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps
- Surfing in Five-Part Harmony
- Tokyo to Tel Aviv
- Flight of the Larrikin
- Bob Evans Means Business
- Midget Wins It All
- But Will it Play in New York?
- Houses of the Holy
- We Own the Sidewalks
- Beautiful from any Angle
- Duke's Big Contest
- Can You Handle the Penetrator?
- Girls, Don't Panic!
- David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water
- An Invincible Summer
Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted
Malibu, 1950. Photo: Joe Quigg
Alan Gomes, 1959, wearing M. Nii trunks
"Sailor white" cutoffs, early '50s
Jacobs Surf Team T-shirts, 1964
Katins in action, 1963. Photo: LeRoy Grannis
It wasn't fashion, exactly, but surfers enjoyed their little style touches. The drawstring atop their trunks, for example, was often purposely left undone while on the beach to swing freely about the crotch. This was surf culture in its purest form—cheap and simple, homemade, and a bit raunchy.
Postwar surfers, as a rule, didn’t wear much—prewar surfers didn't either, for that matter—but what they wore had to be distinctive. Furthermore, unlike blanks and wetsuits, clothes didn’t need the help of military research or patented chemical products from Dupont and Dow. Surf fashion was mostly DIY, invented on or near the beach, by actual surfers, using plain old-fashioned wool or cotton. Bef...
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