A collaboration to break your heart.
It’s safe to say that the highlight of 2018, from a surf culture point of view, was the Backward Fins Beth imbroglio, when the WSL’s new chief commercial officer, their “purveyor of cool, Beth Greves, appeared on @kookoftheday with her fins put in, yeah, backwards.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BjkLtjVAvRr/?taken-by=kook_of_the_day
We ate and regurgitated that morsel here, here, here, here, here and here and bookended the saga with a billboard near Kelly Slater’s wave pool in Lemoore, and installed just before The Surf Ranch Pro.
Slater saw it. He is a tireless online poster, with a rare degree of patience. On his Instagram feed, a magnet for cranks of all kinds, he has spent years debating flat-Earthers, laying out innumerable scientific proofs that the planet is round. He’s a well-informed environmentalist; right-wing flamethrowers rain hellfire on him for that, and he often takes the trouble to reply to them individually. When the Backward Fins Beth billboard went viral, Slater showed a tiny bit of pique. On the BeachGrit Instagram feed, he wrote, “Funny. Cheap. Character Revealing.” The BeachGrit crew was ecstatic. They had successfully trolled the king.
Lovely Nick Carroll called BeachGrit “horribly clever.”
Now, and with much egg on our faces etc, it’s been revealed that putting your fins in backward ain’t such a bad thing.
It works.
And, so, with eyes filled with an empathic warmth towards the pioneer of the backward fins movement, we announce a collaboration with Paul Naude’s Vissla, featuring two t-shirts and a pair of surf trunks with the backward fins motif, as well as our cry for help tee.
(Which you can examine below and buy here.)
All meaningless, of course, without video proof of the backward fins theory being tested.
Want to see if Pipe shredder Cam Richards and pals can fly with reverse fins?
Watch.
