Buying In - (Page 38) 38 rob walker fandom with community would appeal to marketers: Because we all feel that need to resolve individuality with belonging, brand makers are more than willing to sell us something that feels like a solution. No wonder, then, that it’s so easy to draw a straight line from the do-it-yourself spirit embodied by “Beautiful Losers” to the “mass customization” strategies of megabrands like Nike that make it possible for you to pick and choose among colors and styles to design any unique sneaker you want (as long as it has a Nike swoosh on it). This sounds like a typical story of co-optation—like fancy designers cribbing grunge looks from young people and selling it back to them as fashion. And sure, there’s some of that going on. But the truth is more complicated, for two reasons. The first is that even in the days of Dogtown, skateboarding had a partly commercial agenda. Back then it was a fairly straightforward one: Teams and riders and competitions were underwritten by makers of skateboards and skateboard wheels and so on, who obviously hoped to popularize the sport itself. Several of the original Zephyr skaters formed partnerships that put their names on skateboard brands. One, Stacey Peralta, teamed up with an entrepreneur named George Powell in 1978 to form Powell Peralta. This happened at the height of the mass-media, mass-culture era, a time when small companies could hardly afford to, say, make a prime-time television commercial. So there was no major ad campaign promoting the skater way of life. Instead— long before a thousand advertising gurus had added the words viral and meme to their PowerPoint shticks—it was a phenomenon that moved in a truly underground, below-the-radar, alternative-to-the-mainstream way. Among other things, Powell Peralta formed a team it called the Bones Brigade, and in 1982
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