RANT: Fashion – What snowboard enthusiasts are wearing these days and why it hurts my faith in humanity.

You're fucking ugly. I'm looking at you, everybody. What's wrong with style these days? The answer is simple: Everything. You're trying so hard to look different, you look like everyone else.

Tight pants. Jesus fuck. I thought this ridiculous crap got out of hand when guys started wearing their girlfriends' pants, not as a joke or to be ironic, but because they'd convinced themselves it looks good. Believe me, it does not. These are the kids who made fun of baggy-pant guys because that shit flew right off the handle, but to essentially commit the same bullshit in the opposite direction makes you just as ugly, and twice as stupid.

Baggy clothes. And I'm not talking about slightly-loose and actually-comfortable here, I'm talking how-many-Australians-could-you-safely-house-in-that-tent-you-call-a-sweater baggy. Who's your tailor? Oh never mind, it's written in giant letters across your chest, back, and all the way down one of your legs. I hope you charge for advertising space in square-footage. These are almost exclusively the hiphop, “gangsta” boneheads who rock triple-tall “DGK” t-shirts. Listen, if you're snowboarding, chances are high you're no “dirty ghetto kid”. This is an activity of middle and upper-middle class, predominantly white kids. If you want to truthfully label yourselves, found a company called “MUMCPWK”. Then I could rant about your stupid acronym.

I'm not completely innocent either, but that's because nobody makes anything I don't find at least a little ugly, or stupid, or barely-thought out garbage. And don't give me this crap about “why don't you design your own clothes, blah blah pass the cheap beer” because I'm not a designer. That's not my job. All you kids who wasted your parents' savings on a design program at an art school, that's YOUR job. So get to it!

Bringing street to the mountain isn't working. “We put these exposed metal zippers on the pants to look punk.” Great, long as you don't have anything needs pockettin'.

Bandanas are still dumb. You're not robbing a train or protecting your lungs from dust off the backs of 100 head of cattle as you drive them in off Deadman's Pass. It keeps your face warm? Until you breathe into it twice and it turns into a sheet of your frozen french-fry breath? If your face needs projection, wear something that will actually protect it, or do what I did and grow your own.

I don't care what style you subscribe to, if there's a cotton hoody under than block of ice hanging out of the back of your jacket, you're a jackass. And who's idea was it to start pulling their hoods out and wearing them under their goggle strap? It doesn't keep snow out when you're doing park laps, and I've eaten plenty of shit in the powder and I've never experienced snow funnelling down the back of my neck. This is a straight-up, fashion-backward, stupid-looking, adolescent idiocy.

Fluorescent colours? Go fuck yourself.

Lacking proper gear is a constant irritation. It could be grey, flat light, puking snow, and guaranteed some hotshot will be rocking his fire-irridium welding lenses. Decent move, brah. No, I'm over here. Ah, have fun in the moguls. No-gloves nags at my functionality cortex, but Craig Beaulieu has never worn gloves and has never complained, and he's a bulldog of a human so I will let it go.

The one saving grace of all the fuckheaded outfits on the mountain is, like Ed Hardy, it makes douchebags easy to spot. That's right, you look like an Ed Hardy fuckbag. Straighten up.