This is not a #trendwatch.
Nobody is foolish enough to suggest that the pressure flip is in the midst of some novelty comeback. It’s been around. It’s been “a thing.”
More alarming, however, is the fact that 2021’s pressure flips have looked shockingly …good?
It’s easy to forget that so many things — sweatpants, dad sneakers, mom jeans — were novelty upon first re-arrival. They were clunky and tongue-in-cheek. Until the novelty became normalcy, and every pair of sneakers or jeans in the mall looked like them.
Pressure flips have been waddling in that middle ground for years. Tossing one in at the end of a line was once a way to momentarily psych the viewer out of the curation; “An ugly trick!” was not much different than noticing “an ugly sneaker!” many years back.
Imagine the cognitive dissonance that fateful Thursday morning in January, when the #QSTOP10 whiteboard was forced to contend with the fact that the week’s most recommendable trick — in a really good video, at that — was a pressure flip.
Jake Sanso via Duplex 2
Was this merely the consequence of COVID x winter’s collab rotting all sense of time, space and taste in our brains? This 36-degree late-April evening has brought back the memory, and god damn it, it wasn’t.
It really wasn’t just the winter.
It wasn’t an isolated incident, because in a recent video that Free described as feeling like “watching 3 full-lengths squeezed into 18 minutes; or being 14 again and getting traumatized by Dying To Live” — one of the most memorable tricks was a …polejam pressure flip.
Roland Hirsch via Going Nowhere
That very same week, down a set that every flip trick concoction has been done ten-times-over, Casper Brooker did a cool one, too.
Casper Brooker via IG
Has skateboarding’s boom market thrived so hard in the pandemic that even its ugly tricks have lived to see the day when they are accepted as beautiful? Are pressure flips poised for a widespread embrace from those who take #trickselection seriously, much like how ride-on grinds and curbs have worked their way into even the serious repertoires of equally serious skaters who don’t ever laugh?
Sure, some will resist. Everyone’s stupid except them. They’ll blame the kids. They’ll blame the weed.
It brought to mind a heated 2019 car argument about the popularity of a certain song by a young man with a blue face. The aggrieved party just could not understand how he was hearing the same sound waves as everyone else. “It’s awful,” he would insist. “The worst song ever made.”
To which a seldom-participating debater replied: “If it’s so bad …then why’s it a hit?”
How has your brain wrapped itself around this pressurized conundrum?
- A hit's a hit, baby! (70%, 133 Votes)
- I haven't even accepted varial flips yet (30%, 58 Votes)
Total Voters: 191
Loading ...
nah b all bugattis are cars but all cars ain’t bugattis
It’s taken 30 years to see 2 pressure flips like this-similar to a diamond being formed, these things took time (and pressure obvs)
add Mike Carroll’s at Wallenberg on flat to the mix and it’s done-all others are cubic zirconias
Its basically an inward hardflip
Nothing about that last clip was fly
The only legit pressure flip is Ellington’s
I think the key is to make the pressure flip look like it’s in the back 3/impossible family.
I’m probably in the rare bird camp who thinks pressures look waaaaay better than variable flips…
both parties suck, but one sucked a lot less.
MJ does’em
Touzery in John’s vid
Sean Pablo in Purple
Pretty sure both Rowan and Kader had one in their respective intro to Baker parts
Efron’s in Down Bad!!–it made qstop10 like last week
Who else
I’ve never seen one irl
Nate Sherwood’s pressure bigflip nosegrind was psycho.
Pressure flips will never look cool. Kosta definitely running out of content ideas so now he’s tryin to popularize one of the lamest tricks in the book