Surfing in the third millennium: commodifying the visual argot

Australian Journal of Anthropology, The , Dec, 2002 by David Lanagan

Surf Wear: a visible style of surfing

As a result of the change in the image of surfers during the late 1960s and 1970s, sponsorship for competitions begin to shift from business interests outside surfing to more dedicated interests, for instance, clothing and wetsuit manufacturers. As Browne (1991:156) suggests, many of the business interests involved in surfing today began so that the people behind them would be able to '... avoid the nine-to-five syndrome and to make it easier to have fun--which, in most cases, meant going surfing'.

The dedicated business interests of surfing have packaged the activity in such a manner that they achieved a shift in its position from the 'fringe' of wider society to where it is not only accepted, but where the associated lifestyle is embraced by many diverse groups who have no connection with the act of surfing. This has been achieved because the image that surfing elicits, of a pleasurable and playful lifestyle, has been appropriated and commodified, resulting in a profitable market that is based on the sale of clothing and other merchandise that is often described as Surf Wear. These businesses manufacture commodities, which when marketed, present an idealised notion of surfing. This linking of surfing so closely with the commodity, allows the non-surfer to share in the surfing lifestyle by the purchase and wearing of a style of clothing and other products. Such is the impact of this commodification that in 1991, the Bulletin magazine estimated that the global Surf Wear market was worth some A$100 million (Browne 1991:157). However, in a recent article in the The Australian, Guyet (2002:27) quoted a market with global sales of A$40 billion. This scale of business allows surfing capital to exert tremendous control over the activity of surfing and its representations at all levels, both within and outside of the activity.

Surfing's increasingly high profile and the positive image that it creates has seen surfing capital re-shape the sport, succeeding in changing it from a sub-culture as identified by Pearson (1979) and Hull (1976), through what Farmer (1992:248) has described as a semi-deviant scene ...', to the point where we are now, in which surfing images are used in marketing campaigns for a wide range of products that are unrelated to surfing. The reshaping of surfing has allowed surfing capital to commodify the activity and, in doing so, has created an extremely profitable market that is based on the sale of clothing and other commodities. Although, the notion of Surf Wear has been accepted as a largely undisputed category by consumers, the terrain in which Surf Wear is articulated is not described.

The wearing of Surf Wear, and in particular surf t-shirts, is an overt form of identification with a particular lifestyle and group. This is partly due to the nature of logos on t-shirts-- they are large and often in colours that make them bold and easily identified. According to O'Flinn (1990:69), this bold form of dress '... sends out a host of signals to other people about our sense of gender and morality, about our class and income, about our notions of style and taste'. This then brings us to the issue of just what it is that sets a particular article of clothing apart from others that circulate in the same grouping and identifies that article as Surf Wear. Goffman highlights this issue in his discussion of the value of objects in terms of social status, when he states that the value of objects in the social context is determined by the '... expressive difference between them ...' and, in doing so, accounts for the place of these objects in terms of the '... social gains that their owners obtain by showing these possessions to other persons' (1972:263-65).