Style Is Everything

Intro

Watch two skaters land the exact same kickflip down the exact same set of stairs, and you'll see two completely different things. One looks like a formality — pop, spin, catch, done. The other looks like it means something. That difference is style, and in skateboarding, it's not a nice-to-have on top of skill. It's the point.

What "Style Is Everything" Actually Means

The phrase gets thrown around a lot, but it's not just a slogan on a griptape ad. Five-time X Games gold medalist Pedro Barros put it plainly in a 2015 Sports Illustrated interview on style in action sports: "It's what's inside of you, expressed on the way out." Source: Sports Illustrated, "Kings of Style," 2015

That's the core of it. A trick is a physical fact — you either land it or you don't. Style is everything else: how the trick got there, and what it revealed about the person doing it.

Longboard brand Carver Skateboards has built an entire philosophy around this same idea, but from a different angle. Their decks are engineered to replicate the feeling of surfing on pavement, and their "Style Is Everything" campaign argues that skating should be judged less like a checklist of tricks and more like a wave ridden well — the goal isn't to complete a maneuver, it's to make the ride itself look and feel good from start to finish. Source: Carver Skateboards, "Style Is Everything"

Where It Actually Comes From: Surfing, Empty Pools, and No Rules

This isn't a modern marketing idea — it's how skateboarding style was born. In the 1970s, the Zephyr team (the group that would later become famous as the Z-Boys) skated with a visibly surf-influenced posture: low center of gravity, wide stance, carving lines across pavement the way you'd carve across a wave face. When a Southern California drought left backyard pools empty, that surf-derived style found its natural home — vertical walls that let skaters translate wave-riding motion directly onto concrete. Source: Zephyr team history, goat.com "Ramp to Runway"

Rodney Mullen — inventor of the modern flatground ollie and kickflip, and widely credited as the godfather of street skating — has talked for decades about why he was drawn to skateboarding in the first place, and it wasn't about winning: "I fell in love with skateboarding because it was individual; there were no teams or captains, and there was nothing to perfect or style to be measured." Source: surfertoday.com, "The Greatest Skateboarding Quotes of All Time"

That's a genuinely important point buried in that quote: for most of skateboarding's history, there was no judge, no scorecard, no official definition of "good." Style filled that entire vacuum. It became the only real currency, because it was the only thing anyone could actually evaluate.

Technique vs. Style: Same Trick, Different Skater

This is where it gets concrete. Skateboarding media outlet Dose Skateboarding ran a long analysis on exactly this question — what style actually is — and the answer wasn't really a definition. It was a list of names, because style only makes sense as something you can point at. Source: Dose Skateboarding, "What Is Style? An Analysis"

A few real examples make the point better than any abstract description:

• Tom Penny built an entire reputation not on doing harder tricks than everyone else, but on making relatively simple tricks look effortless and unhurried — smooth enough that he's still cited today as a reference point for "relaxed" style. Source: Wikipedia, "Street skateboarding"
• Paul Rodriguez is known for a clean, snapped-tight pop and a landing that looks almost mechanically precise — technical mastery expressed as sharpness rather than flow.
• Dylan Rieder, who passed away in 2016, is still referenced constantly for a kind of understated confidence in his skating that had little to do with trick difficulty and everything to do with how unbothered he looked doing it.

Same board, same gravity, same tricks in the record books — completely different signatures. That's the whole argument for why "landing it" was never the finish line.

Where Style Actually Lives

Style isn't one thing you can isolate. It shows up in the accumulation of small decisions:

• Body positioning — how compressed or extended someone is through a trick, how the arms and shoulders move (or stay still) while everything else is in motion.
• Push and flow — the rhythm of getting from one obstacle to the next, not just the tricks themselves.
• Line selection — which obstacles someone chooses to hit, and in what order, often says as much about their style as any single trick.
• Landings — a stomped, controlled landing reads completely differently from a scrambled, saved one, even when both technically "count."

Dose Skateboarding's piece makes a useful point here: style isn't really about any single trick or even a single session. It's the pattern across everything someone does over time — which is exactly why it can't be copied the way a trick can. Source: Dose Skateboarding, "What Is Style? An Analysis"

You Can't Force It

Here's the part that trips people up. Style isn't a setting you turn on. It's not something you get by studying footage and consciously trying to replicate someone else's shoulder position. It shows up as a byproduct of skating a lot, staying in your own body, and not performing for a camera that isn't there.

Trying to force a "look" usually produces the opposite of style — something visibly effortful, which is the one thing real style never looks like. The skaters most often cited for great style are, almost without exception, described as looking like they're barely trying.

Clothes Are Part of the Culture — But Not the Point

Skate style also refers to something else entirely: what people wear, how they carry themselves off the board. That history is real and it runs deep. The original Zephyr team wore board shorts and striped surf-derived shirts, then shifted toward jeans and flannel once skaters started hitting harder terrain like pools and ditches, where the extra protection actually mattered. By the late 1970s, UK punk had pushed skate fashion somewhere rougher entirely — leather jackets, bondage pants, and Chuck Taylors on riders like Steve Olson and Duane Peters. Source: goat.com, "Ramp to Runway: The Evolution of Skate Fashion"

Rodney Mullen has made the connection between how skaters move and how they dress explicit: "You can always tell a skateboarder from a long way away by how he dresses and how he moves." Source: South China Morning Post

But it's worth being precise about the difference. The way someone dresses is aesthetic. The way someone skates is the actual style this article is about, and the two aren't the same thing. You can dress the part perfectly and still skate like it means nothing, or dress like nobody's watching and skate with more presence than anyone in the room.

Style Has Always Mattered More Than Perfection

This isn't a new take. Long before judged contests tried to formalize scoring, skateboarding culture already valued how something looked over how technically hard it was — which is exactly why a scene with literally no rulebook still managed to agree, almost unanimously, on who its most respected riders were. A skater known for a smooth, controlled ollie down a three-set has always been remembered longer than someone who barely made it down a twelve-set once and never skated it the same way twice. Difficulty gets you a moment. Style gets you a reputation.

Find Yours

Tricks can be learned, drilled, and eventually copied by enough people that they stop meaning anything special. Style can't be copied — the moment you try to copy it, it becomes an impression of someone else, not your own. So the actual useful advice, if there is any, isn't "work on your style." It's simpler than that: skate a lot, skate honestly, and stop watching yourself from the outside. The style shows up on its own. It always does.

Sources

• Sports Illustrated — "Kings of style: How to master one of the most elusive skills in action sports" (2015)
• Dose Skateboarding — "What Is Style? An Analysis"
• Carver Skateboards — "Style Is Everything"
• goat.com — "Ramp to Runway: The Evolution of Skate Fashion"
• surfertoday.com — "The Greatest Skateboarding Quotes of All Time"
• South China Morning Post — Rodney Mullen interview
• Wikipedia — "Street skateboarding," "Rodney Mullen," "Skateboarding styles"