How Skate Took Menswear By Storm

Around the concrete caves of Southbank and the long lines of Lafayette Street, the square around Monument à la République and through the picturesque metro stations of St. Petersburg, you’ll find hundreds of kids – young men, some women – who look like they’ve walked straight off the catwalk. They’re not necessarily cover model-handsome – perpetual shiners and chipped teeth, kerb-gashed eyebrows, pavement-burnt skin, and years of smoking cheap weed can definitely zap a healthy glow – nor are they tall enough for most casting directors, but their style has been pilfered wholesale by menswear designers the world over all the same. “I like that young kids from America and Russia look the same and have the same moods and hypes,” skate-inspired Gosha Rubchinskiy told Dazed, a designer whose garish juxtaposition of Russia’s tricolour, American iconography and Cyrillic script put across skateboarding staples has seen him dubbed both the most exciting thing in menswear and the hoodied harbinger of seriously bad taste. Read more at FashionBeans.