Where did Fat Willy’s fit into all this? At the time their stickers seemed everywhere and therefore absolutely no part of the underground skate culture. Both this and the Boogie designs adverts may seem innocent enough now, but at the time they would have stood out like sore thumbs.
That sounds very snotty, but at the time these things mattered to us. There was a constant (amiable) struggle with the advertising department to convince them that we had very little to do with genuine surf culture, let alone the High Street variety. In this we were skate snobs, of course, and fighting a pointless battle.
The crossover and blurring of all these boundaries is now a done deed and it paid my wages for many years at New Deal. But there is a part of me that still clings to the notion that there was something special about the pure-skate companies.