Much commotion was made over a tre flip in 2025. After the Top 10 Desk conceded to the zeitgeist in its final dispatch of the year — rather than clawing against it like it might’ve stubbornly been inclined to do during less-exhausting years — the QS office was able to find consolation in the fact that this tre flip could be left behind in the year it had come to define.
And what better way to palette-cleanse and usher in a new year for tre flips than… over a hundred new tre flips?
“Excuse me sir, your phone and pills are on the ledge we’re trying to skate.”
As the company charter dictates, before we put the lid on 2025, we must chop up a bunch of clips from the past twelve months to the year’s defining songs. And man, is it a tremendous relief to have MexikoDro soundtracking the chilling-but-sometimes-hitting-the-bar experience in 2025. If someone can make “woke up, took a shower, got dressed” sound that fuckin’ cool, there’s no reason for you not to find the magic in the routine of your own life, yaknow? Beyond that, we’d like to welcome Tinashe back to the fold of the “Best of” edit #musicsupervision for the first time since 2014 …with a song that sounds like it’s right out of 2014 (in a good way, obvs.) And if you didn’t hear “Shake It To The Max” seventeen billion times this year, you didn’t leave your house. Here’s one more.
Otherwise, we filmed Antonio and K.T. do seventeen billion switch tre’s, went to Lisbon, and got stuck at the Banks more than once. Thanks everyone for rocking with us this year, and thanks to Jefé and K.T. for filming a bunch of the phone clips. See everyone in 2026 ❤️
(There was some fuzzy audio shit in a couple of the clips I couldn’t figure out, but December 30th isn’t a day for troubleshooting. It’s an edit for the bros, not Cannes.)
📷 Matteo Botti by Matt Price
We had hit Marcello about his availability for something completely unrelated this past fall, and he mentioned he was in Rome. Now, like most Americans, if you’ve been to Rome, and stayed in the historic center that most tourists stay in, you quickly come to the conclusion that yeah, maybe Rome isn’t the best city for skate spots. (By contrast, in Turin or Milan, you can find spots pretty easy… Florence and central Naples, yeah nah.)
“You’re going on a skate trip …to Rome? Interesting?” seems like a common reaction to many of us who don’t know any better, but it turns out we’re all idiots.
Watching this edit, our first reaction was, “these spots are …in Rome?!” Turns out a lot of things change when you leave the historic tourist center. Shocking, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the same day that we dropped Toda Fuerza’s Havana edit, we got an email asking, “We saw you posted a Cuba edit. What about a Vietnam edit, another place where the skate scene is only just now beginning to grow exponentially?”
The two polarities of QS are that we are incredibly interested in what’s happened at the ledge down the street from the office, and we love a video out of a scene that we know next to nothing about. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is certainly one of those places.
📹 Video by Adam Abada
Back in 2021, when we did part two of the oral history behind all the skate photos featuring the Twin Towers, we got Atiba on the horn to talk through a few shots from ~1997. In doing the digging for those, he happened to uncover a small cache of unscanned New York photos he forgot about because they didn’t feel like much at the time, but obviously took on new meaning as the years went by and the world changed.
In the midst of Atiba’s monthslong media tour promoting his latest Vans collection, we visited him at his office to see just what else he had in the stash from New York. For a guy who got started working in skateboarding in San Diego in 1995, headed into what can only be described as a “golden age” for print media, we wanted to know what he saw, shot, and remembered from this city that was generally only a novelty in an era dominated by the west coast.
