Lifestyle
Tony Hawk Hopes Enthusiasm for Vert Skating Can Bring it Back to Olympics
Tony Hawk took skateboarding to new heights in 1999 when, high above a halfpipe at the X Games, he began furiously spinning, completing two and a half turns in the air before gliding gracefully back onto the ramp.
The 900 — named for the number of degrees of rotation the move requires — had seemed impossible, but Mr. Hawk, his sport’s biggest star, had landed it, rewriting the rules of what could be done on a skateboard and exposing the sport to a far more mainstream audience.
Then, shortly after his moment of triumph, Mr. Hawk’s form of gravity-defying skating began fading away, nearly to the point of extinction. It was replaced by a street style that was more easily learned at skate parks, with an entire generation of skaters leaving the giant ramps behind.
That, however, is starting to change.
Social media has been flooded in recent months with videos of prepubescent skateboarders launching themselves off ramps and flying into the air, landing the kinds of tricks that experienced skaters have been reluctant to attempt. They are shifting the paradigm with their gravity-defying moves, and inspiring other kids around the world to try the same.
Mr. Hawk’s style of vertical skating — “vert” to those who practice it — is making a comeback, and he is desperate to turn that momentum into a return of the event at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Vert is skateboarding in its most spectacular form. Its simplicity, combined with the pure excitement in its perilous maneuvers, makes it easy for those who don’t skate to understand.
Mr. Hawk, thanks to his 900 and the wildly popular video game that followed in its wake, “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” had cemented himself as the face of the sport in the early 2000s. But, unbeknown to his new admirers, his dedication to vert was a case of clinging to the past.
“It’s still kind of considered niche,” Mr. Hawk said in an interview, discussing the current state of vert skateboarding. “That’s what’s hard for me to accept.”
The reality is that Mr. Hawk’s accomplishments on vert ramps had simply made the practice seem more popular than it was. Renton Millar, a former professional skater and the head of the Vert Skating Commission for World Skate, the sport’s governing body, said vert skaters like Mr. Hawk have typically been a minority, “who stand out because it is so rad.”
Enter people like Tom Schaar, a 25-year-old skater who many view as vert’s next big star and a potential bridge between older generations and the next one — the kids who are finding the sport through social media.
Mr. Schaar, who is signed to Mr. Hawk’s Birdhouse skateboard company, was born the year Mr. Hawk landed his first 900. He rode his first real vert ramp at age six, and later managed to land a 900 and a 1080 in the same year. He was 12 years old.
“The 900 took a lot longer,” Mr. Schaar said of learning the two difficult tricks. “Once you get over the fear of kind of doing those extra spins, they kind of all just blur together into one big spinning mess.”
Vert rewards the type of consequence-blind actions that are typical of an adolescent, and adolescents are shaping the style’s future.
“Young skaters have more resources,” Mr. Hawk said. “They have training facilities now, and children are encouraged to start skating. That wasn’t the case when we were young. Children were discouraged from skating. It was a bad influence, with no future.”
Mr. Hawk said it took him 10 years of attempting it before he landed the 900, finally achieving the feat when he was 31 years old. Now, he watches in awe as young skaters build on his accomplishments and those of his peers. Last year, Arisa Trew became the first female skater to land a 900. She was 13 years old at the time.
“Some of the kids, as soon as they start riding, they are fascinated with aerials and they know what is possible,” Mr. Hawk said. “To them, a 540 is just a starting point. A 540 wasn’t even created until I was in my teens, you know?”
Mr. Hawk, ever the evangelist, knows what he wants to happen next. The Summer Olympics are heading to Los Angeles in 2028. Southern California is the global epicenter of skateboarding, and Mr. Hawk has been, as he puts it, “hustling” to get vert added as an event. It would increase the visibility of the form and, Mr. Hawk believes, lead to more vert ramps being built. To help get things started, he’s willing to put his own equipment on the line.
“I would give them my ramp,” Mr. Hawk said feverishly. “I would say ‘Here’s the terrain. Find a place for it, and it’s all yours.’ I have the best vert ramp in the world, and it’s portable. It can be assembled in a couple of hours. It’s all yours.”
The International Olympic Committee will issue its final decision on vert and other events for the 2028 Olympics at its next executive board meeting on April 9.
Many skaters believe having a vert competition is an obvious choice for the Olympics, but it was left out of the 2020 and 2024 Games, Mr. Hawk said, because of bureaucratic challenges, and an overall lack of vert skaters at the time.
Mr. Schaar, who also excels at park-style skating, took home a silver medal in that event at the 2024 Olympics. But he competes in that style out of necessity; vert remains his primary passion.
“When my grandma’s watching the Olympics, street and park are very technical for someone who doesn’t understand skating,” Mr. Schaar said.
Mr. Hawk said that at the time of the discussions to add skateboarding to the 2020 Games, he knew there were not enough vert skaters left to constitute a competitive field. As the sport’s popularity has grown, however, so has his public advocacy.
“The gap between genders and the quality of skating around the globe was big back then,” said Luca Basilico, who oversees skateboarding for World Skate. “It was another time. But we’re not there anymore.”
To get to this point, the sport has had to let go of its past.
By the time he landed the 900, Mr. Hawk and his cohort — holdovers from the 1980s when vert was the dominant style of skateboarding — were aging out of their professional careers. Very few vert skaters were coming up behind them, leaving Mr. Hawk as one of the few loud voices pushing for it to continue.
“People who skate today, especially those who are 25 and older, they will all tell you that they started skating because of Tony Hawk in some way,” said Jimmy Wilkins, a pre-eminent vert skater. “Even if that’s not the case, they probably grew up skating in a park he built for them.”
The young skaters reviving the art of vert on Instagram, however, are not so closely tied to Mr. Hawk. They were born after his big moments. Their innovation and advancement of the form is its own, new thing.
Elliot Sloan, a 36-year-old vert skater who went pro in 2008, described a “huge gap” between generational cohorts of vert skaters, which had made his own pursuit fairly lonely. He considered himself lucky to have been a part of a sport that was still alive, thanks in large part to Mr. Hawk’s successes in the late 1990s.
Mr. Hawk’s accomplishments are far in the past, however, and Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Sloan are decidedly vert elders. And the skaters coming up behind them are getting incredibly good, incredibly fast.
“I’ve just seen so many of these kids start coming up being like seven years old, and I’m thinking ‘This kid’s pretty good,’” Mr. Sloan said. “And then the next thing you know, I’m competing against him.”
“The greatest thing in the vert resurgence is the bit of groundswell that it has with the kids,” said Mr. Millar. “There’s a number of vert facilities around the world, where, in the past, there was almost none.”
While the rise of young vert skaters has shocked some veterans, it has allowed Mr. Hawk to keep pushing it back into the public eye. But no matter the era, the popularity or the visibility of the sport, it cannot be separated from the man himself, who has stuck to his old habits, despite his official retirement.
“I’ve gotta go skate,” he said at the conclusion of an interview. His friend Bucky Lasek, another legend of the 1990s, was coming over. They were going to spend the day on Mr. Hawk’s personal ramp.
Cristóbal Tapia de Veer did not have an entirely pleasant stay at “The White Lotus.”
Mr. Tapia de Veer, a 51-year-old composer who was born in Chile, joined a video call on Monday from his home in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, a gong the size of a beach ball visible over his right shoulder. We had planned to discuss his score for Season 3 of the HBO show — specifically, its reworked main title theme, which ignited a minor fury among fans when the season premiered in February.
The conversation went in a very different direction. Mr. Tapia de Veer, who has won three Emmy Awards for his work on “The White Lotus,” said he would not be returning for the show’s fourth season.
He described creative disagreements with the show’s creator and director, Mike White, that began during Season 1. Conversations with producers could be “hysterical,” Mr. Tapia de Veer said, and the show’s creative team repeatedly requested music that was more upbeat and less experimental than the work Mr. Tapia de Veer wanted to produce. (Representatives for HBO declined to comment for this article.)
“I feel like this was, you know, a rock ’n’ roll band story,” Mr. Tapia de Veer said. “I was like, OK, this is like a rock band I’ve been in before where the guitar player doesn’t understand the singer at all.”
And about that eerie Season 3 theme? Mr. Tapia de Veer loves it, but had hoped the season would include a longer version that builds into the more recognizable melody from the Season 1 and Season 2. Frustrated by its absence, he posted the “uncut ending” to his YouTube channel. (You can listen to it below.)
In the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed, Mr. Tapia de Veer reflected on his tenure with the show.
I want to go back to the moment when the Season 2 theme that you composed for “The White Lotus” became a phenomenon — it had all these remixes, it was playing in clubs. Did that put any pressure on the next season?
Pressure? Not really. The pressure has always been something else in this show. And since we’re talking themes, I wonder if I should tell you for the first theme, how it got to the second — like, the whole “White Lotus” theme thing. You know, I haven’t done any interviews, so I don’t even know where to start with this.
Start wherever you’d like.
It’s kind of weird right now because I announced to the team a few months ago that I was not coming back, that I was leaving. I didn’t tell Mike for various reasons; I wanted to tell him just at the end for the shock and whatever. Except I told the whole editorial team and music editor and producer and all that, but I didn’t think that they were going to tell him. At some point he heard about that.
This is your last season, for sure?
Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Did Mike say anything to you when he found out that you planned to leave?
He says a lot of things, but I can’t really talk about that. There was a French movie, “La Cage Aux Folles.” You know how there’s Albin, which is like the star, and there’s Renato, who is the producer who is always taking care that Albin doesn’t lose his mind about something, because Albin is the diva and Renato is the guy who is trying to make everything work. To me, the show felt very much like that.
Did it feel like that from the beginning?
When I got the script, I wasn’t sure that it was something for me, because it was very well written, but there’s a reality TV kind of vibe going on, and comedic. My stuff in general is the opposite of this, it’s super dark and edgy. But when we had the talk with Mike, I just told him in a joke that I thought we could do some kind of “Hawaiian Hitchcock,” and he really grabbed on that and he started laughing.
I feel like I need to give credit where credit is due, because it’s hard to know how something like “The White Lotus” can actually happen, which is harder than people might imagine. You see it afterward, and it’s a success, but to get there is quite the struggle. I was on the phone with her [Heather Persons, one of the show’s producers] all the time, and she was trying to convince Mike about this theme, because he didn’t want the theme.
He didn’t want the Season 1 theme?
He had a temp score, a song that is more like something you would listen to in Ibiza, in some clubby place with a chill, sexy vibe. And there’s literally no edge to it. It’s a good song; it’s nice music. There’s just absolutely no — whatever you find in the “White Lotus” music, the relationships with the characters — there’s none of that. It’s just nice background music.
I just stuck to what I was doing. And when I was giving versions, it was still the same thing: There were still crazy people and screaming and stuff like that. From there, it became this weird relationship of, How do I pass all this weird music into the show?
What direction were you given for the Season 3 theme, “Enlightenment”?
There was no direction. When I started working on this, I had a collection of Thai gongs that are unrelated to the show. So I started experimenting with that, and then I started looking for someone to play the saw u, which is the Thai violin, which in the theme happens in the beginning.
My mom sent me an accordion at some point, an Italian accordion, and I have no idea how to play it. But I was able to play that. I think it helps the melody, to make it more uplifting, because the melody is very dark.
How did you come up with the melody? Did you consider including that “ooh-loo-loo-loo” melody from Seasons 1 and 2?
The melody is special. It’s something very weird, and is almost impossible to sing unless you’re a singer with a good ear, because the intervals in it are really hard. It has a mystery in it that is kind of magic to me. It’s like there’s some witchery going on.
I have, like, over 20 versions of that theme, with and without the ooh-loo-loo-loos. But of course, in the 1:45 titles that’s allowed, there’s nothing from the other ones. That was kind of a risk, but we never talked about that. I don’t think everybody was really aware of how attached people were to the ooh-loo-loo-loos.
What was it like for you, watching people get so upset that the melody was different? (“I do not understand why you would break something that was perfect,” read one social media post.)
When that came out, I had TMZ calling me, even people from England and from France, because they wanted some kind of statement about the theme. People are furious about the change of the theme, and I thought that was interesting.
I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ooh-loo-loo-loos, because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway. He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that — he wasn’t happy about that.
I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything. So I just uploaded that to my YouTube.
Do you think people have warmed up to the theme as it is?
Oh, yeah. At one point, people were like insulting me and sending me horrible things. And then I started seeing these videos: ‘You know what, I used to hate the theme but now I’m kind of dancing to it.’ It’s like they’re transformed. I was really excited about that.
How are you feeling now about the decision to move on?
I mean, it is what it is. You know, I was watching the Emmys, and it’s like, there’s one thing I’m pretty proud of and that is I feel like I never gave up. Maybe I was being unprofessional, and for sure Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted. But what I gave him did this, you know — did those Emmys, people going crazy.
People don’t remember, but at first some people were complaining about the music: “I can’t concentrate on the characters, and it’s too much and I’m so stressed out.” But I’m really happy to take those kinds of risks. That is the main thing that I’m most happy about — it was worth all the tension and almost forcing the music into the show, in a way, because I didn’t have that many allies in there.
I treasure that more than something else I did that was just a success, and it works and that’s that, with less struggle. This was a good struggle.
Lifestyle
A shopping experience bringing rare design, art and fashion — with a little bit of intimidation
It was clear while ascending to the Pacific Design Center that Design.Space — the inaugural retail experience blending rare design, art and fashion — was for the heads. In the parking lot, I spotted a woman wearing a coat from the Row, another in a pair of Miu Miu thong-boots. The signaling was subtle but clear: We come to this place for flexing. I followed them and other stylish people to the top floor of the center, where rooms holding rare works of art, housewares, furniture and fashion awaited.
The point for Jesse Lee — founder of the online design marketplace, Basic.Space, which organized Design.Space last weekend — was less see and be seen, and more: see, be seen, and most importantly: buy. Buy. Buy. Buy. Everything was for sale, from the niche perfumes of Troye Sivan’s Tsu Lange Yor, to the red Chirac Sofa by Paulin Paulin Paulin X Christo & Jeanne-Claude X Parley for the Oceans, shown in an all-red room. Outside, French architect and designer Jean Prouvé’s iconic gas station from 1969 made its debut on American soil.
Sadie wears Prada on the Chirac Sofa made in collaboration with Paulin Paulin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Parley.
Other participants included fashion brands and vintage dealers, from 424 to Justin Reed; cornerstones of Italian design, like Memphis Milano and Edizioni del Pesce by Gaetano Pesce. One-of-one art objects, like the silver and crystal-encrusted can openers and martini glasses from the Future Perfect’s Perfect Nothing Catalog. While many, if not most, of the pieces shown at the fair were museum worthy, Design.Space was never intended to be a museum, says Lee. It’s not a passive experience, but an interactive, high-stakes marketplace.
Walking through Design.Space felt like being in the fanciest department store in an upscale mall 30 years ago — before malls were mere skeletons, before we spent all our time scrolling on the Real Real or 1stDibs. Design.Space was filled with the sexiness and tension of the shopping experiences of yore. There was crispy white carpet in rooms featuring iconic design pieces from the Italian design house Gufram, including the Pratone lounge chair in the vibrant shape and color of oversized blades of grass. There were performance art elements from other vendors. Enorme was selling its original 1985 phone designed by Jean Pigozzi, Ettore Sottsass and David Kelley in a set made to look and feel like an ‘80s office, including a model in period-perfect styling, hair and makeup, speaking on said phone. It felt like watching a movie. There were also moving moments of discovery. I was stunned to find that the beautiful, silver bean bag chair I was immediately drawn to (and almost plopped down on) was actually a 2007 sculpture made of rock-hard aluminum by Cheryl Ekstrom, presented by JF Chen.
Isabel, left, wears JNCO pants, Gucci polo, Nike T90’s sneakers, vintage puka necklace. Sadie wears Courrèges set, Chloé shoes. Module tables and porthole mirrors by Willo Perron for NO GA.
Lee was inspired by his own experiences of shopping at Barney’s in Beverly Hills (RIP) as a design-obsessed youth, before he had the means to be shopping at Barney’s. “What we want this to be is obsessively curated and unapologetically commercial,” Lee says. “What I miss is what Barney’s was for me 10 years ago. It wasn’t about the prices or what I bought, but it was more about the fact that I could easily spend six, seven hours really immersing myself in the experience of this luxury store.”
Design.Space also feels like a subtle protest of this new L.A. aesthetic that has emerged in the last 15 years — blond wood, airy, minimalist design, a plant in the corner — that Lee (and I, and many others) have grown fatigued over. These spaces scream: “We’re casual, we’re accessible.”
With Design.Space, Lee says: “I want this experience to have a little bit of intimidation.”
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As we were scouring the racks from Archived, a rare designer fashion and furniture showroom, one of my Design.Space companions, an editor, noted: “Alex Israel just took his glasses off.” We collectively realized we’d never actually seen the artist without his sunglasses, but in this context it made the most sense. These pieces we were all poring over demanded a closer look: From an Autumn/Winter 2002 Gucci shearling fur coat, to a pair of perfectly worn-in Helmut Lang leather pants from the late ‘90s that made me salivate. In the same exhibiting room was Hommemade, A$AP Rocky’s interior design studio. It featured the Hommemade Cafe, which was serving a meticulous espresso martini, and the Hommemade entertainment console and professional studio on wheels — complete with a projector, microphones, snack dispenser and rolling tray. Rocky’s first collection with Ray-Ban as its newly appointed creative director was also on display. Later that evening, Rocky himself made an appearance, effectively consecrating his own corner of the fair and Design.Space as a whole.
Sadie wears John Galliano top, Lado Bokuchava skirt, Windsor Smith shoes inside “Gas Station 1969” by Jean Prouvé.
Design.Space was invite-only. And its invitees felt like a rare group, for whom niche furniture designers and archival fashion pieces existed in tabs that lived side by side in their brains. It was different from the crowd of patrons you might see at a traditional art fair (not enough rizz), different from those, even, whom you may see at a fashion party (performative rizz). These people, it was clear, were intentional about the capital D-design of everything in their lives, from their jackets to their salt and pepper shakers.
Photography Em Monforte
Styling Keyla Marquez
Models Sadie Kim, Isabel Jennings
Makeup Selena Ruiz
Hair Adrian Arredondo
Video editor Mark Potts
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo assistants Phoebe Tohl, Atlas Acopian
Styling assistant Julianna Aguirre
Location Pacific Design Center
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
When I set out to write an article about the New York-based, Instagram-famous nail artist Mei Kawajiri, I had never gotten a professional manicure before. Or, really, any manicure at all.
My mom — a neat freak if you’ve ever met one — was opposed to manicures on principle, for the fact that nail polish stains. So, growing up, I would go to a friend’s house and secretly have her paint my nails, only to use polish remover to scrub away the evidence.
Then in high school, I played softball, and, well, I don’t know if you’ve ever jammed your fingers into a dusty leather glove and snared a line drive, but let’s just say manicures and softball do not exactly mix.
Still, nails have always been an object of fascination for me, whether in the form of Sigourney Weaver’s purply-pink rattlesnake venom-spiked talons in the movie “Holes” or Cynthia Erivo’s forest-green ombré acrylics in “Wicked.”
Last year, I stumbled upon the Instagram page of Ms. Kawajiri, who has created elaborate custom nail looks for stars such as Cardi B, Ariana Grande and Bad Bunny. There were nails with hand-drawn portraits of anime heroines. Six-inch acrylic sets embedded with jewels and lace. Tips affixed with 3-D miniatures of asparagus, French fries, hair bows — even dirty socks.
These weren’t just manicures. They were works of art.
So when Dan Saltzstein, the deputy editor on the Projects and Collaborations team at The Times, approached me in January to ask if I had any ideas for an upcoming Art of Craft series about specialists whose work rises to the level of art, I had the perfect candidate.
The articles in the series break down an often-complex creation process into easily digestible steps: the nitty-gritty of exactly how someone fashions ornate, $5,000 saddles with a six-year wait time, for instance, or how an avant-garde balloon artist patiently coaxes stubborn latex into ephemeral inflatable sculptures.
I had originally been set to attend a photo shoot in mid-February with Ms. Kawajiri and our photographer and videographer, Sasha Arutyunova, but my grandfather died (he was 95), and I had to miss the shoot to attend his memorial service.
So I scheduled an interview with Ms. Kawajiri for the following week, and was faced with the challenge of writing an article detailing a three-hour technical process without having observed it. There were different types of nail tips? Of varying sharpness? This was a revelation to me.
But over the course of our 90-minute conversation, Ms. Kawajiri walked me through her tools — the brush with a tip as thin as a strand of hair that she uses to create elaborate hand-drawn designs on nails, the eye shadow she sometimes opts for in lieu of gel polish to fill in her finest 3-D shapes, the name of the 3-D gel she uses to sculpt miniature croissants and suitcases.
I asked about how things worked, or how the steps unfolded, when I couldn’t fill in the blanks. What is a base coat? What is a topcoat? What is the difference between a gel manicure and a regular one?
Ms. Kawajiri was very patient. And, in a way, my reporting required more sustained concentration than if I had watched her work.
It was all part of a conundrum for journalists that comes up often: Is it better to be knowledgeable about a given topic, enabling you to ask informed or nuanced questions, or to be a neophyte, coming to a story fresh, the way many readers do?
I’m sure an artistic nails enthusiast, or someone who has had even one manicure, would have asked more about specific techniques. But my inexperience ultimately — I hope — made for a clearer and more accessible article for readers who also didn’t know the first thing about nail art.
I came away with an appreciation for the artistry that goes into creating mind-boggling levels of detail on a minuscule canvas. I listened as Ms. Kawajiri explained her fascination with nails as a form of self-expression. I loved that she found inspiration everywhere, including in her real life, drawing from objects as mundane as her baby’s bottle.
I was reminded that no question is too small to document the exacting process it takes to create something deceptively complex. I’m learning alongside the reader, so any questions I have are ones my audience will likely share.
That’s one of the great joys of journalism — I write about people and places I never would have imagined, and I’m often surprised by the level of effort that goes into seemingly simple creations, whether that’s a poem, the Oscars red carpet or a set of potato chip-inspired nails.
And don’t worry, mom — my own nails are still boring, pink and clean as ever.
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