Chill as a Bowl of Frosties

Natalie Westling showed up at 17 and made both fashion and skate culture collectively lose their composure. From Arizona, she’d already worked with Marc Jacobs, signed with Elite, and shot alongside Miley Cyrus before most people her age had figured out what they wanted from a Saturday. i-D put it simply: she’s chill as a bowl of Frosties.

The video they made with her—officially a primer on skateboard etiquette—is really just a portrait of someone constitutionally incapable of performing effort. That quality, the total absence of try-hard energy, is what separates the models who skate for the aesthetic from the ones who grew up doing it. Westling grew up doing it, and it shows in every frame. She doesn’t pose on a board. She just rides.

Fashion usually gets this wrong. It discovers a subculture, extracts the visual language, and installs someone who looks the part but has no roots in it. Every now and then it finds the real thing. There’s a reason the skate world didn’t roll its eyes at her the way it would have been perfectly justified in doing. She came from somewhere. That somewhere is still visible, even in the high-fashion context—maybe especially there.