Three Years Ago, Alexis Sablone Skated in the Olympics. Next Up? Designing Team USA's Uniforms

Chatting with the skater and all-around polymath about cooking up Olympic gear and the weirdness of treating skateboarding like a regular sport.
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Photographs courtesy of Converse; Collage: Gabe Conte

Alexis Sablone’s favorite place to skate in New York City is a playground nicknamed “Toddler Ledges” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Sablone usually pushes there from her apartment, at around seven a.m., and skates for a few solitary hours before shifting gear into one of her roles as a professional skateboarder, architect, and designer.

This spring, we meet not at a skate spot but at Converse's Paris showroom. Sablone arrives fresh off a flight from Chicago where they’re working on a skateboarding-based humanities fellowship alongside author Kyle Beachy and professor Tina Post. She wanders in clutching her skateboard and wearing a black leather pair of her signature shoe, the AS-1. A year ago, we met at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for its launch to discuss designing the sneaker. Whereas this trip to Paris marks another milestone: Sablone has designed the USA’s Olympic skateboarding kit for the Paris 2024 Games.

Alexis Sablone embodies multiple dualities: an East Coast heritage, grounded demeanor, and commanding style make her a real “skater’s skater” but she’s also a former Olympian with an impressive track record in competition skating, a discipline not often held in the culture’s highest esteem. It adds to the mythos that Sablone supported her undergraduate and master’s degrees by succeeding in contests—notable given the industry's uneven (if, in recent years, increasing) support for non-male skaters. A pretty reserved person, Sablone explains: “If I could, I’d skate at dusk. That’s when my body actually wants to skate. That would be nice as it’s the break from whatever I was working on all day. But I’m too shy and I want to skate alone a lot of the time, honestly.” Although becoming a bigger deal with each passing year—having just landed a Thrasher Magazine cover for the first time—the idea of someone else wearing her shoe in a video skate still feels fun, if a little strange. “Usually, when I’ve put a lot of time and energy into something, by the time it’s due or done and out in the world, I hate it,” says Sablone. “Seeing other people like it too is affirming for me.”

For a culture which is more form than sport, the announcement of skateboarding’s Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020 (bumped back to 2021) caused, in some corners, something of an existential nightmare. Despite reasonable endemic debates, one result—a boost in female representation—was obvious: the average age of medalists across women’s skateboarding was just 14 years old, compared to 27 years old across all Tokyo 2020 disciplines. In the years since, communities of women, along with folks of marginalized genders, sexualities, and ethnicities have gained prominence in skateboarding’s ecosystem, from the professional ranks to grassroots levels. Overall, the Olympics is just one of a number of new platforms for skating: increasingly, it's pulled into the worlds of arts, architecture, and academia.

Sablone points out that the sportification of skating is offset by the very nature of the thing itself. “For some, skating is a way to hang out with your friends. There aren’t many other things where there’s an activity which doesn’t have to be fenced in. You can explore a city, find new places to do it, and build friendships whilst you’re doing it. There’s something beautiful about that.”

Sablone with the Team USA kit.

Courtesy of Converse
How do you feel about the knock-on effect of skateboarding’s post-Olympic notoriety? For example, an artist friend of mine has been working on developing more inclusive public and skate spaces as part of a council-backed arts programme. He’s certain that catching the Olympic tailwind helped get his proposal for it through. So, I’ve seen it have an impact completely removed from any competitive side.

As someone who started skating in a very different time, there’s the nostalgic part of me that’s like, “Skateboarding is just for me and that other kid over there.” It used to be rare. Part of opening it up to the whole world, in this really public way through something like the Olympics, it’s done a lot for female skaters. Four, five, six years ago there were only a few female skaters being supported by the industry at all. That was already changing. It was a dual thing: social media mixed with the Olympics being on the horizon. The growing communities of non-male skaters, you could put metrics on it. It’s gross to put metrics on things, but in this case that was an argument for a long time: “There’s no market for that,” or, “Girls aren’t doing it.” Suddenly, they were able to find each other and form [online] communities that then turned into, oftentimes, actual communities. There was no visibility, and the Olympics was a wake-up call for a lot of larger companies. Like, “Wait, there are two podiums…”

In turn, that has made some young female skaters, literally teenage girls, into superstars. Rayssa Leal is having something of a moment, Funa Nakayama had the cover of Thrasher… I’m not crediting the Olympics for their development and ability—maybe it was something to strive for—but perhaps them being Olympians has helped lift skateboarding’s public facing image in a way that’s more representative of its demographic today.

I think that makes sense. There's still a part of skating where you have people who think this is what skateboarding is but it’s important to have role models. If something is unprecedented, if a young girl has no example of someone who isn't just exceeding and good at skating, but if the skate community doesn’t seem to be embracing them and propping up the best females in the industry, maybe it's discouraging to want to go down that path. It just needed momentum and I do think social media and the Olympics are the things that gave it a push. The potential was there all along.

Talking about role models, I think skaters are more multifaceted these days. You’re a multifaceted person, someone like Ryan Lay—who is involved with NGOs, to setting up Slow Impact, to his outdoorsy interests—fits that, too. It’s nice that people might look up to skateboarders and aspire to be like them, but not solely on the merit of their skating.

I would argue there have always been some multifaceted skaters. There’s always been an overlap between art and skateboarding. So much of that is because, whilst there are unspoken rules in skateboarding, it’s not as goal-oriented or mapped out as other sports. That room for creativity and people who didn’t feel like they fit into more team or group settings has always attracted weirdos, artists, musicians, designers, and all that.

Now, there’s a full jockishness, too, but there are a lot more skateboarders, so there’s a broader spectrum. Because of all the changes in skateboarding, and the way the world is seeing skateboarding, because of social media, because of conferences like Pushing Boarders, there’s all this overlap. You wouldn’t have had a skate panel ten years ago. I think that has made more space for multifaceted skaters to…

Become more prominent? I feel like skaters are paying as much attention to those on the periphery these days. The spotlight of skate media no longer solely rests on the professionals.

Everyone is so good now that being “good”—like, if you’re that good, then go be in the Olympics! Not to take anything away from people who are prodigies. But when someone skates, that means they’re part of skateboarding, and they understand skateboarding regardless of their skill level or ability. If they also have things to say, or they’re trying to organize and expand what skateboarding is about or how it can be seen, then that has just as much value, if not more.

You worked on the Olympic skateboarding kit for the Paris 2024 games. Tell me about the design and development process.

Kelly Bird [Global Brand Manager for Nike SB] called me out of the blue and asked if I was interested. I was very shocked. I didn’t feel incapable, I was just like: “Wow, I can’t believe they thought of me to do this.” Skateboarding had only been in the Olympics once. I was pretty excited and it was a real challenge.

In what way?

I’ve designed a shoe, I’ve done graphics and animations for years within skateboarding. There’s no pressure [in that context] and randomness is fine, like, whatever idea pops into your head.

“Let’s put it on a shirt.”

“What’s it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

But it feels more loaded as Olympic apparel. It’s like, “What does that mean, and why?” The fact people are going to have to wear these things in a very public setting when they’re nervous… Skateboarders mostly wear jeans and t-shirts, but they might change their jeans and t-shirt five times before they decide. Skateboarders are picky.

Once I started working on it, I wanted to provide a lot of options. The styles were already determined. There was something that looked, to me, like a soccer jersey, a bowling shirt, something workwear, a basketball jersey. I actually loved that because until relatively recently there’s no athletic wear that’s “skate-wear,” you know? Skaters have just appropriated clothes. You can look at the ‘90s and skaters are in basketball jerseys. The challenge was that I wanted to stay true, in certain ways, to the style type. Like, “If this is a soccer jersey, how can it look like a soccer jersey?” but have…

A skate flair to it?

Yeah, so on the bowler shirt it’s chain stitched, a classic bowler look but playing with a skater trope.

Sablone's designs all in one place.

Courtesy of Converse
Were there other points that informed the design?

I really wanted this crest, which ended up on the soccer jersey. I’ve always loved that with jerseys—a patch that has a bunch of meaning. I approached it like that: if there was an emblem that represented American skateboarding, what would be there and why? It was the same for Japan and Fed-Agnostic uniforms [the outfits unattributed to any one country].

For some of them, especially the American crest, I took some classic symbols. An eagle, a rose, but to me an eagle seemed so serious. Skateboarding can be serious but it's playful and improvisational, so that’s where I arrived at a saxophone-playing eagle. Which is kind of absurd but kind of fun. Then for the Fed-Agnostic it was: “Well, if this doesn’t belong to a country, what animal represents skateboarders?” A chameleon came out of that idea. [Ed.: The Japanese skate kit, also designed by Sablone, was unavailable for preview at the time of this interview.]

I write for Quartersnacks and we have a series called “Five Favorite Parts” where people talk about their most personally influential skate videos. After Seize the Seconds, your section started to get picked frequently.

Really?

Yeah, it seems to have become something of a cornerstone text for female millennial skaters. It reminds me of what Elissa Steamer’s part in Welcome To Hell was for previous generations.

That’s on my list.

What do you hope that your personal impact on skating is most attached to? Being someone who bridges skating and the fields of architecture and design, being one of leading non-male figures in the culture, or simply as someone whose footage and skating will continue to inspire for years to come?

If I have any impact at all! Some people might not care about architecture and design and that’s fine. If they just like my skate parts, that’s cool. When someone knows the work I do beyond skateboarding, that means a lot because I probably spend more hours of the day with my head within that stuff. As I get older, well, my future definitely isn’t going to be jumping down even more stairs. Selfishly, I guess if that’s where I’m going, then I hope [skateboarders] like me for that, too.

It’s great to hear. Some people are prolific and I’m not [laughs]. But I put a lot into the little things I put out. There’s so much [skate media] nowadays that it’s not possible to have time for everything. To me, what matters most is something that feels genuine and stands out. So, that must mean to someone, my skating feels genuine and stands out.