VITA on Gasoline Surfers
Cory started Young Psychos because he couldn't find car clothing worth wearing. Most of it was merch: cheap blanks with a logo, made to sell something else. The rest looked like a pit crew uniform. So he built the brand the other way around, clothing first, made for people who live this stuff.
VITA's Noa Nichol picked up that thread in her feature on Gasoline Surfers. She got into how a collection about cars ended up at the beach. Cory windsurfed long before he was a car guy, and to him the two scenes meet at identity: the hobby stops being a hobby and becomes a way of living, down to how you talk and how you dress.
She wrote about Alex Ramon Mas too, the Spanish illustrator who drew the graphics by hand in vintage colour palettes. And she wrote about why every YP series is made once, with no restocks.
Much of the feature is about the decks. Nichol spoke with Oasis Skateboard Factory, the Toronto alternative high school where students earn credits by designing and building skateboards. Their one board became 48 more, made in Canada from their design, with every dollar going back to the school. She got the students' reaction when they found out it was going into production, and why it mattered that the finished deck looked like a pro design, not a school project.
She closes on the collection itself: "[Gasoline Surfers] all comes back to making something worth keeping."