With the Olympics taking place in menswear’s favorite city—Tokyo!—and including for the first time menswear’s favorite sport—skateboarding!—the Summer 2020 games are probably going to be the Most Menswear Olympics Yet. The Uncut Gems Olympics. The crying-at-the-Craig-Green-show Olympics. Picture the attendee street style, not to mention the inexhaustible parade of fashion that will be the post-game fits. Wait until Simone Biles finds out about Kapital!
Enter—and cue that Grateful Dead bootleg, because let’s just go with it!—Nike’s uniforms for skateboarding. The “exuberant styles” that Nike produced for the United States team have been tepidly received online, but to be fair, no uniform could ever capture the spirit of skate style, which is loose and free and not at all about matching—not even your socks.
But the boiler suit Nike designed for the French women’s team? That is bon, bébé! It’s easy, it’s polished, it’s cool. It’s the cloth embodiment of skateboarding je ne sais quoi. We’re not saying you should root for France or whatever—although the idea of Brigitte Macron on French morning television, standing and maybe even moving on a Louis Vuitton skateboard, is really making me think we should Photoshop a skateboard under the feet of the female figure in Liberty Leading the People—but the uniforms are definitely where ~it~, as they say, is at. If a women’s blog wants to turn out a magnum opus on how to skate like a French girl, we would definitely study it in Proustian depth.
