Sean Pablo Is In His Yacht Core Era

Sean Pablo is restless. The 25-year-old Supreme skater recently moved home, back into his teenage bedroom in Los Angeles, because he wanted to escape New York. When we speak in early March, he’s chilling somewhere in Florida, because he already wanted to escape LA. Pro skaters are nomadic by trade, and Pablo’s been bouncing back and forth between the two coasts since he was 14. He’s ready to see something new and weird for once.

“I always knew that I wanted to get the fuck out of there,” he tells me by phone, referring to the LA neighborhood where he grew up. And even though he’s back for now, that’s also very much subject to change. “I want to move down to Miami or something because, I don’t know, LA and New York, it’s just too much of the same ideas being circulated around. Everybody’s just kind of circlejerking each other.”

It’s been almost nine years to the day since the 2014 Supreme video “Cherry” sent a then-14-year-old Pablo on his way to pro-skater superstardom. Talking to GQ Back in 2020, Pablo’s pal Chloë Sevigny placed him in the tradition of handsome, stylish skateboarders whose charisma elevates them beyond the sport: “People just crush out on them,” she said. “There’s a mystery and a nuance, and obviously the beauty is captivating as well.”

While he’s still the dreamiest dude on the Supreme team, Pablo is now at a crossroads. In an interview published in 032c magazines This week, he detailed his traumatic recovery from a tibia-shattering street-skating accident last summer. He had already sustained injuries in an earlier incident that eventually led him—guided by his friend, the filmmaker Harmony Korine—to seek treatment for abusing painkillers. “The path to paradise begins in hell,” the famous Dante Alighieri adage, has become Pablo’s new mantra. This makes sense for many reasons, the least consequential of them being that his nearly eight-year-old streetwear brand—which he co-designs with his dad—also just so happens to be called Paradise.

In the latest Paradise NYC collection, which drops online this week, the team riffs on much of the same deep-fried symbolism that they’ve had in the past: screwy Disney characters, Catholic iconography, various New York-centric emblems. But this time, it’s all a little more…Lost Paradise, There’s a hoodie featuring a halo-wearing Mickey Mouse giving the finger. (After all, Disney, billed as the happiest place on Earth, can be a real nightmare.) A pair of sweatpants are printed with images of Virgin Mary statuettes weeping blood. Another tee, decorated with a cutesy Bambi illustration and the words “FUCK EVERYTHING,” is a riff on a previous version that said “HAPPY EVERYTHING.”

The designs, Pablo admits, are kind of shitpost-y. “The Jurassic Christ one is kind of my favorite,” he laughs. “I think everybody wants to make something that’s just purely original, and I want to play with that idea a little bit and just poke holes in it, you know what I mean? It’s almost like people might be like, ‘Is he stupid? Does he not understand that’s just a complete ripoff?’ And so that’s kind of a little joke, I guess.”