1980s – More Brands And More Sports

’80s fashion was dominated by vivid colours and styling, memorably luminous colours on wetsuits. Surf brand logos like sports logos could be prominent on clothes, helping increase their exposure and value, and transcend them into general fashion. Maui and Sons based its surf clothes on creativity and nature, symbolised in its cookie logo. Quiksilver launched ‘Echo Beach’, a range of boardshorts featuring radical print designs of polka dots, harlequins, stars and checks, as surfwear rediscovered its wild side; they featured a velcro fly with snaps, and were built bulletproof – here is a grey blue and yellow pair with palms, still available today (contact us!).

In 1980 Jim Jannard’s Oakley made its first sunglasses innovation adding soft ‘grippy’ rubber to the frames, with the Oakley logo highly prevalent. Sunglasses would never be the same.

1984 saw Reef started in CA by Argentinian brothers Fernando and Santiago Aguerre. They moved to La Jolla with $4000 to market active lifestyle sandals (made in Brazil). Plus Mambo in Australia, their t shirts screen-printed with strong humorous religious and political themes, and the infamous farting box-shaped dog.

Through the ’80s surfing fashion spread again as related spin-offs grew into fully-fledged sports: windsurfing, more popular in Europe, brought new brands including F2 Mistral and Neil Pryde; snowboarding snowballed on North America slopes during 70s and 80s, with new brands like Burton and Sims joining their surf brand cousins; kite-surfing developed from the 80s, given a royal-surfing-seal of approval when demonstrated by big-wave-riding Laird Hamilton (in Maui later in the 90s); wakeboarding also at this time grew from waterskiing. Manufacturers of kit and equipment in each sport released surf clothes, and the diversity grew. Water-based sports demanded strong swimwear, a good match with surf brands even if they missed the ‘pure natural heart’ of wave riding. Each sport had hardware-specific manufacturer brands, but surf lifestyle clothing applied readily to each. It was a logical extension for surfwear brands, and for their customers, and gave them wider licence for lifestyle-fashion.

Anything and everything seemed possible in the ’80s. Bikinis got more daring with the introduction sexy swimwear with G-strings and thongs, allowing even more of the body to show. The sexy-side of swimwear was matched by a geeky-side: swimwear companies such as Tyr Sports in 1985, with the TYR (pronounced ‘tier’) brand, began research into high tech materials, with innovations that would increase the functionality of the clothes. Reef’s marketing of ’simple’ sandals with all the surrounding branding and imagery of the beach illustrates how swim and swim wear had exploded along the different dimensions of fashion and function – and surf wear rode the waves.

And whatever direction it went surfwear was determined to make the wave colourful. The decade ended in a spew of colours and shades – with the brand logos more conspicuous, in full view, and even part of the product itself. This was an typical ’80s flourish, dominated by men and their own fashion sense, before the arrival of ladies to surfing officially in the ’90s and the move to more ‘acceptable’ forms of surf uniform.

NEXT: The 1990s – Ladies, Stitching, And The Modern Uniform

Back: The 1970s – The Big Surf Brands

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