August 31st, 2006
The Looks Or The Lifestyle
I’ve been joining in on a forum recently where a friend started a thread reminiscing about his first MTB. Soon everyone joined in. At one point it looked dangerously close to degenerating into an “I’m more old skool than you” fight, but it was pulled back from the brink because everyone on this forum either knows everyone else directly or by proxy and was able to poke fun at the ridiculous stuff that we put up with “back in the day”. And I go nowhere near as far back as most of the folk who were posting.
The fact that it didn’t degenerate into a snob-fight and turned into a celebration of bikes and biking no matter how new someone was to them struck a chord with me. It’s something that has been nagging at me since we went to Cornwall the other week and learnt to surf.
Do you have the looks or the lifestyle?
When we needed some surf stuff we went into Newquay, Home of British Surfing™. We braved a permanent traffic jam of holidaymakers, stag do’s in Billabong/Hot Tuna/Wierd Fish/Mambo shirts looking for the cheapest bar not the best surf at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, and girls in “Newquay Life Guard” hoodies. It soon became apparent that this throng only wanted the look.
And they are well served. For the most part Newquay sells not the surfing lifestyle but the surfing look. Boards/wetsuits on display in shopwindows are a mere front for a fashion shop selling the look. Of course it would be unfair of me to tar all shops with the same brush and dedicated surf lifestyle shops are available. They can usually be identified by staff that look like they might actually know one end of a board from the other. Chances are they’d be brand or logo free.
Despite patently not having the surfing look every genuine surfer - perhaps recognising some spark of enthusiasm for the sport - was very helpful as I struggled to my feet (literally) in this new arena. For one week they welcomed me in and let me taste their lifestyle.
And so back to the bikes. Without fail everyone on this forum had the lifestyle, however vaguely that may be defined, and how long you had lived it was irrelevant.
As it turns out trying to keep up with fashion and get the look was one of the things that we ended up laughing about.
It was hard to keep any dignity wearing flouro Local Motion gloves and Troll climbing tights back then.
With hindsight it’s even harder.
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