His
first childhood memory of water is of being held beneath the surface
until he thought he would drown. He imagines his last memory of water
might be a moment when he is towed into an 80-foot monster he
anticipates will take him out.
And
that would be a good death, said Kelly Slater, the American pro surfer
who has spent most of his 43 years in an element that once held terror
for him, a fear he not only managed but subdued in the surprising way he
seems to do most things, by careful study.
If
Zen deliberation is not often associated with the sport that gave us
Gidget and cowabunga and viral beat-down videos from Oahu’s gorgeous,
lawless North Shore and also decades of glossy, vaguely pornographic
images of men sluiced like little gametes through lubricious curling
tubes, then that may explain why Mr. Slater became the most decorated
surfer in history.
The Perfect Wave
He
has been named World Tour Champion a record 11 times, winning five of
those titles consecutively from 1994 to 1998. He became the first surfer
ever to earn two perfect scores in a two-wave scoring system, a feat he
first accomplished in 2005 in the final heat of the Billabong Pro
Tahiti contest at Teahupo’o and repeated in June 2013, at an age when
most pro athletes have long since given up sports that provoke
adrenaline surges powerful enough that fear becomes its own agent for
duffer activities like golf.
He is also, as it happens, a two-handicap golfer.
And
there is more logic to that than you may at first imagine because in
golf, as in surfing, every choice is a matter of personal
responsibility. “I’m the one that has to deal with the outcome,” Mr.
Slater said. “Golf teaches you that.”
He
alighted briefly in New York from his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla., on a
rare mild day during a bitter East Coast winter. Depending upon whim and
global surf reports, he may impulsively hop a jet tomorrow and head to
Australia. This is not unusual for Mr. Slater or anyone else engaged in
the world’s most peripatetic line of work.
“It’s
nothing for me to get on a plane to the other side of the world,” said
Mr. Slater, who was in town to preview his latest venture, a line of
ready-to-wear clothing called Outerknown. Ready-to-wear hardly
encompasses the full Outerknown brief, although the vaporous rubric of
“lifestyle brand” is not much better.
Yet
it was Mr. Slater’s lifestyle, his determined yet laid-back manner and
how it emblematizes a lucrative sector of the clothing market (luxury
and sports-lifestyle) that made him appealing to Kering, the global
conglomerate behind Gucci, Balenciaga, Stella McCartney and Bottega
Veneta, and now him.
Many
took it as a gag when Mr. Slater abruptly quit a lucrative endorsement
deal with the surf wear behemoth Quiksilver last year on the cusp of
April Fools’ Day; he’d had the gig, after all, since he was 18.
Yet
the decision to part with Quiksilver, long in coming, and the later
partnership with Kering were part of a strategy to build a brand with
lofty ethical goals, one that deployed his renown without turning him
into what he called “a fame whore,” one whose nominal cornerstones are
“style, sustainability and travel.”
From
the start, Mr. Slater chose as collaborators seasoned insiders (Julie
Gilhart, the former fashion director of Barneys New York; Stella Ishii,
the woman instrumental in nurturing brands like Alexander Wang, 3.1
Phillip Lim and the Row) whose selection telegraphed the intentions of a
man who claims to have known from the very first surf contest he
entered that he was destined to win. “I looked around, and the other
people weren’t that good,” he said.
The Key Partner
Doubtless
the collaborator most crucial to Outerknown’s success is the surfer and
designer John Moore, who once oversaw men’s wear design for J. Crew and
whose influential niche label, M.Nii, last year led GQ to designate him
one of the best new men’s wear designers around.
Named
for a Japanese-American tailor whose shop in Makaha on the west coast
of Oahu once turned out board shorts for the surfing elite in what many
judge to have been the glory days of late-20th-century Hawaiian surfing
(and also swimsuits for John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley), M.Nii neatly
distills Hawaiian surfing circa 1968.
“Surfing
is not just about this Beach Boys phenomenon,” Mr. Moore not long ago
told a reporter. “It came from Hawaii, it’s thousands of years old, and
it’s always been about that intangible cool.”
Mr. Slater.
Credit
Morgan Maassen for The New York Times
Cool,
in Mr. Slater’s case, is anything but intangible: He all but radiates
it. Partly this owes to the rugged handsomeness of a sun-grooved face
still marked by the remnants of boyhood acne and partly to his status as
a world-class athlete.
Yet
it is his intensity that defines his style and manner, the laser focus
that allowed him last October to pull off a 540-degree aerial maneuver
surfing off Portugal.
That
particular move had never before been successfully completed, let alone
by a 42-year-old athlete at what may reasonably be thought of as the
end of his career.
The Death Spin
A friend who caught the Death Spin (a name suggested by a 10-year-old from among his million Instagram followers)
on his iPhone quickly put it on YouTube; three minutes later it had
flowed definitively into the Internet’s noisy slipstream. “I was lucky,
the wind coming from the beach allowed me to spin faster,” Mr. Slater
modestly said of his aeronautics. “I didn’t really realize what had
happened at the time.”
He
was seated in a booth at Margaux, a restaurant in the surfer-hotelier
Sean MacPherson’s Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village, sipping an
almond-milk cappuccino. Wearing black jeans and a black shirt buttoned
to the neck, Mr. Slater had the offhand, slightly eccentric style
characteristic of surfers from an earlier era, one in which early
proponents of the sport like Mr. MacPherson’s mother wore thrift-shop
cashmeres into the Pacific because wet suits then were heavy and costly.
More
than most of his competitors, Mr. Slater styles himself both a
sartorial and spiritual inheritor of surf greats like the madman Mickey
Dora, the longboard god Joel Tudor and the unsung hero Peter Townend, a
handsome white-blond champion who, as Mr. Slater said, “probably never
earned more than $4,000 a year on the tour.”
“I love surf culture and its history,” said Mr. Slater; Outerknown is his way of tapping the source.
“It’s
a way to tangibly create something that embodies our ideals and
philosophies, which seems a little philosophical for clothes or
whatever,” he said of a label whose website teases the debut next month
of a complete line of men’s wear (denims, windbreakers, sweatpants and
beautifully detailed plaid shirts reminiscent of “Endless Summer”) with
home page images as moody and suggestive as they are provocatively
vague: a lone tent pitched on the edge of what looks like a fjord; a
frame house floating atop pilings above Stiltsville, the tenuous
community set in the shallows off the coast of South Florida; Mr. Slater
free-diving into fathomless turquoise depths, sleek and amphibious.
“I
love utopian ideas,” he said. “I’ve been a perfectionist my whole life.
Well, not a perfectionist, but always looking for a best way to do
things.”
In
functional terms, he added, that means that — whether glissading down a
vertiginous water mountain at Pipeline, or flowing into your swing at
Pebble Beach, or bewitching multinationals into funding a clothing line
that owes as much to conjuring up archetypes of masculinity as to
anything as banal as board shorts — it is important to observe a martial
arts precept from one of Mr. Slater’s longtime heroes, Bruce Lee.
“I
always related to his philosophy of using energy efficiently,” Mr.
Slater said before heading out into the New York twilight and then
onward. “The Zen of anything comes from understanding its purpose and
function, and then executing in the most efficient way.”
