Controversy and shock as France unveils surf team’s Paris 2024 outfits

Surf culture reimagined!

The fashion and surf worlds were thrown into a terrific spin yesterday with the unveiling of Stephane Ashpool’s Olympic uniforms for Paris 2024. 

The designer, Stephane Ashpool, is the creator of the baseball-influenced Pigalle brand, so-named after the gritty neighbourhood he grew up in (notoriously dangerous for our Jewish brothers but, then, so is all of France), but also an excellent part of town to find a gender non-specific pal for affectionate kissing after a long day examining La Joconde at the Louvre or climbing the Tour Eiffel. 

Ashpool used the ol red-white-and-blue, the colours of the tricolour, but merged the colours into a gradient to reflect, he says, “a sense of diversity in colour, but also diversity in the body.”

The designer says France’s diversity ain’t always obvious on TV and films there, which is true.

Watch a French film, which are among the worst in the world, and you’d think the joint was filled with middle-class whites in fitted raw denim, tight pale blue shirts and brown boots, not the cornucopia of African and Arabic culture that it really is. 

The beautifully named Le Coq Sportif, the athletic rooster, have made the outfits but one set stood out, the surf team’s nod to kook chic.

The unfortunate model, pictured below, red hair permed and dyed yellow, beard its natural red, stands, belly out, in the white rash shirt and knee-length trunks, surfboard held non-ironically with tail scraping the ground.

A necklace and Oakley Blades completes an ensemble that hasn’t been seen in the surf world since Wilbur Kookmeyer was a staple of surf culture. 

But is it the worst Olympic uniform ever?

Crappier than the Spaniards’s Maccas-themed gear in 2012 or Canada’s gay cowboy look at Calgary, 1988? 

The French team is a dark horse fav to win double gold at Teahupoo in July.

It includes Tahitians Kauli Vaast and Vahine Fierro, as well as Hossegor’s Joan Duru and Johanne Defay from Renton Island. All of ‘em know how to thread a tube.