About

‘The Promise of the Experience’

As a community skateboarding offers its participants the promise of an experience, the feel of a well-designed skateboard under your feet, a highly innovative shoe and tailored clothing that can withstand fall after fall, impact after impact. Having spent the past seventeen years submerged in this sub culture as a professional sportswear photographer I have witnessed this hot house of innovation, the biomechanical engineering of footwear and fabric design as well as its impact on the mainstream fashion industry. Yet little has been acknowledged within the academic research community. Why is this so?

My motivation is to understand the innovative promise of the skateboarding experience and explore the relationship skateboarding has to innovation and invention in relation to fabrics and fashion design. In addition I am keen to uncover the impact of innovation from skateboarding across the broader fashion industry.