The Skateboard That Comes With White Gloves

The cotton gloves are the part I can’t get over. SHUT, the New York skate brand, and designer Matthew Willet built a fully functional gold-plated skateboard—eighty centimeters long, twenty wide, four kilograms of actual riding weight—and then included a pair of white cotton gloves in the box so you won’t scratch the finish when you pick it up. Before you take it down a dirty ramp, presumably.

It costs around fifteen thousand dollars. It is real.

There’s something perfectly absurd about an object that is simultaneously a working skateboard and a thing you’re not supposed to touch with your bare hands. Skate culture built itself on the democratic logic of concrete and cheap plywood—the idea that all you need is a board and a curb. SHUT has been part of that world since the late eighties, one of New York’s oldest skate companies, and now here they are gilding it. Literally.

Whether that’s a critique or just a very expensive joke is unclear, and I suspect that’s the point. Eleven thousand euros for the right to own the most ridiculous object at any skate plaza in the world. The kids watching from the fence would be furious, which is half the appeal.