Youth Culture trend forecasters have been repeatedly pointing us toward Taro Tamai’s Gentemstick snowboards. First it was a two-year-old video on Youtube showing the Gentemstick crew cruising snow bowls in Japan. Now it is a post on the hype blog CoolHunting.com. But what are these retro-future snowboards exactly?
An answer to the homogenization of board shapes that happened as snowboarding gained mainstream appeal, Tamai’s goal is no less than to “perfectly blend into the terrain miraculously made of snow and wind, just as if birds flying in the sky or fish flowing in the stream.” The upshot of his philosophical approach to the sport (he calls it snow-surfing) is a line of boards renowned for their flexible fins, oversized sized fish tails and rideability in almost any snow condition.
So are these boards the “longboard skateboards” of snowboarding? Could be.
[Link: Gentemstick via Coolhunting]
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