I used to be a street skater in the mid nineties in a small German town. Was pretty cool, doing all the street skating stuff. And we made sure to not be associated with "Rollerbladers", the guys and girls (obviously girls were different so) using the stoppers to brake. It stopped being cool so, no idea why exactly. Hell, we even had people with home made half and quarter pipes in their backyards back then...

That sounds like, instead of those skaters being free individualists or rebels, they were excessively controlled commercial consumers.

If so, how did that happen, in that case?

That sounds like a riddle. Do the trendsetters control fashion, or does fashion control the trendsetters?

It's probably a complex dynamical interaction.

The fact that the favored brands kept changing though, suggests to me that the corporations weren't exactly in control (otherwise the first winning brand would have presumably preferred to permanently monopolize the market).

Why does fashion of the kind "this is the look right now" and "that look is so last season" exist?

To what degree would we do fashion naturally, if there weren't parties looking to exploit fashion dynamics for selfish advantage?

Dr Seuss explained it in "The Sneetches", it's all about status signalling.

> if there weren't parties looking to exploit fashion dynamics for selfish advantage?

What parties are those, the elites using fashion to signal higher status, the people selling the elites the latest fashion, or the underdogs trying to catch up to what the elites are wearing so they can attain high status too? Aren't they all following selfish motives?

The shift usually was to newer, smaller, more underground I guess companies with the best up and coming skaters. Skate mags/vids were a big part of this. There was always a sense of transition and growth, esp for street as people did more aggressive things.

So yes, there was a commercial aspect to it, but from a marketing sense, it was driven by being iconoclastic, being super in tune with where the industry was heading and style/trends/tricks/skaters was heading.

Being a rebel is chucking away societal norms, and I do feel that was how most skaters felt back then… you were definitely in a bubble.

I suspect that it has to do with any trend that gets too big, and the only antidote is to make the rules into a moving target. This happened with punk rock when I was into that. At some point, the punk bands rebelled against punk fashion, and started showing up in worn but otherwise regular looking street clothes.