Anything But Uniform: Behind the Design of This Year’s Skate Federation Kits
- May 22, 2024
For designer and Converse CONS skateboarder Alexis Sablone, where you ride is just as important as how you ride it.
Skateboarding is built on encountering public spaces and seeing what others do not. A statue ledge becomes the perfect place to try a nose slide. A bottomless staircase is the platform to huck yourself down and land a legendary aerial. In skate, public sites and visual sight go hand in hand.
This summer in Paris, skate will be in the world’s eye; it’s maybe the most public sporting event that exists. So when Alexis was asked to design the crests for this year’s skate federation kits, she wanted to create designs that finely illustrated the relationship between skaters and the places where they ride.
Alexis Sablone throws caution to the wind and sends it down a stairway.
Last year, Alexis got the call from Nike SB designers to design three crests for the national federation kits: one for the United States, one for Japan, and an agnostic kit that wasn’t affiliated with any country. Her background as a multidisciplinary artist made her uniquely qualified for the job. Her experience as a competitor in Tokyo four years ago reminded her of an innate trait that carries into her professional life: competitiveness. Knowing skaters would wear the crests proudly on their chests in Paris, she set a personal standard of perfection for the designs.
“I’m a very driven, goal-oriented person,” says Alexis. “Not because I want to be. I think I’m just built that way. In Tokyo, I skated the best I could — performed even better than I thought I would, but in hindsight, it’s still hard to not see all the ways you might’ve done better. For better or for worse, I approach design projects in much the same way. I set impossible standards and iterate endlessly until I arrive at something that feels right.”
“Eagles look serious, and competitive skate can be overly serious at times,” says Alexis, seen here holding the apparel. “I wanted to incorporate a sense of playfulness.”
To begin the designs, Alexis started with narrative. She reflected on skateboarding’s proud roots in the United States dating back to the 1950s, when California surfers created a way to carve on land when the waves were flat. For a skate crest, then, patriotism had to be fun. Serious history couldn’t be too serious. She decided to make bald eagles the muse for the American kits — and she had them jamming on a saxophone. The playful choice nodded to the improvisational nature of skate.
For Alexis, the crests differed from her other skate-industry projects, like creating graphics on apparel, giving art direction for shoots and designing skateable sculptures. Place and pride had to share the stage. The crests needed to speak to an entire country as much as they did to a single individual.
“I wanted to create enough range that there might be a style for every skater, from louder and more graphic-heavy pieces to more subtle and subdued, but still with some character,” she says.
The agnostic kit gave Alexis the opportunity to explore another skate narrative: the sport’s growing community. The design features a pair of chameleons connected by a wavy illustration of the globe, surrounded by four unique species of orchids, one of the most diverse and unpredictable plants on the planet.
“My reasoning for chameleons was simple,” says Alexis. “Skateboarding is a diverse and growing community, and skaters can look any number ways. Beyond that, the act of skateboarding is about constantly seeking out interesting conditions in the urban environment and finding ways to creatively interact and adapt.”
“I’m a very driven, goal-oriented person. Not because I want to be. I think I’m just built that way.”
The diversity that the agnostic crest represents is a big change from the skating world in which Alexis grew up. She describes skating as a 9-year-old in the small town of Old Saybrook, Conn., as a mostly solo pursuit. Finding a local skate community as a new rider was hard. (“Finding other female riders was almost impossible,” she adds). Now, almost three decades into her skate career, she’s seen the community embrace riders from all backgrounds, all experience levels and all communities, whether they were connected by a zip code or a screen. Consider that the fastest-growing demographic of new skaters by a landslide is young women. Finding a skate community has never been easier. More riders from all walks of life are gathering at the skate park, the local skate shop or the city plaza.
Alexis views her love for architecture as a natural connection to her intrinsic sense of place as a skater and as a designer for the federation crests. She obtained her master’s degree in architecture from MIT in 2016 without the intention of designing for the skate industry, she says. It took her awhile to put together that skaters have an inherent interest in public spaces — the accessible cityscapes that many would never think twice about. The alleyway, the eerie courtyard, the stairs with steps that are uncomfortably spaced apart. This fascination with the accessibility of skateable places is what motivated her to design skateable sculptures in cities.
“The beauty of skateboarding is that it offers a new way to see and explore the city,” says Alexis. “One way to activate and enliven cities is to make them more skate-friendly through legalization and a more open-minded attitude toward allowing skaters in existing spaces, as well as through the design of new skateable public art and architecture.”
“Skate culture has developed around a genuine obsession with seeking out and interacting with the spaces in the city,” says Alexis.
That reasoning is partly why, for Alexis, the federation crests represent more than a patch on a jersey. They express whole communities that will descend in one geographical spot this summer — the famous Place de la Concorde, in the heart of Paris — to put on a show for everyone watching.
“Skate culture has developed around a genuine obsession with seeking out and interacting with the spaces in the city. From that simple practice, a growing, resilient community has flourished. With everything I design, I reach for similar qualities: genuine and resilient. Simple, honest designs that will hold up over time. My process is guided more by intuition than formula. I want people to see these designs in Paris and feel like they could have existed 15 years ago or 15 years from now.”