Jason Dill doesn't drive. He walks. So on Christmas morning in Ventura, California, last year, he woke up at the usual time—around 7 a.m.—stepped out his door and hoofed it the mile to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. On the way back, his coffee was getting cold, so he stopped at the Circle K to warm it back up. He added a splash of joe to his cup, saw a long line at the register, and decided that it wasn't worth the wait.
When he got outside, he heard someone behind him say, “Hey, buddy. You gonna pay for that?” Dill turned and saw that the guy was not alone. There was a kid with him, about 16, wearing a Thrasher hoodie and Vans, worn through with skate holes. Dill stopped, flummoxed. “I've been on the cover of that magazine,” he said, pointing to the logo on the kid's sweatshirt. “Twice.”
And then Dill walked away.
A Thrasher cover is just about the apex of a professional skate career. He was also on the Vans pro team and has had numerous sneakers made with his name on them. But those aren't Jason Dill's only accolades. He is a titan of influence in skateboarding. Every trick he's done, every outfit he's worn, and all of the crazy stories that make up the Jason Dill mythology are crucial entries in the skate canon. That influence began when he was just a kid in Huntington Beach, California, and extends soundly, unwaveringly into 2019. Dill's style—his tricks, his attitude, his clothes, hell, his visage—is foundational to what skateboarding is today.
Now, as he settles into his role as a wizened elder—complete with a raucous and sometimes dangerous history behind him—for the first time in his life and career, he has a job and real responsibility. The streetwear brand he started with his friend Mike Piscitelli back in the early 2000s, Fucking Awesome, has grown into a fully realized, globally recognized skate and clothing company. This year, Fucking Awesome is planning to open its first shop, in West Hollywood. The company remains fully independent, owned entirely by Dill, Piscitelli, and a third partner, pro skater and longtime friend Anthony Van Engelen (also known as AVE).
“I tell you what, I didn't want to do this shit,” Dill tells me. We're hanging in one of the three apartments he rents in a building in Ventura. “I never wanted to make a fucking board company. It just seemed like a pain in the ass. And it is. It is a huge, huge pain in the ass.”
The problem—and, in fact, the primary boon—of Fucking Awesome is that Dill does it all himself. Just about every graphic, every board design, every piece of clothing, starts with Dill. That's one of the reasons the brand resonates so powerfully with people around the world—not just skaters—and why it's stocked at top-tier shops like Supreme, Dover Street Market, and Opening Ceremony. Dill's twisted worldview, his dark wit, his keen and easy sense of style—all of those things go into pieces like a T-shirt with a handwritten graphic that reads "Yeah Yeah Here We Go Again…Another Bullshit FA T-shirt Blah Blah" or a button-down with an all-over, full-color print of stamps collected off eBay. He also develops innovative board designs using hologram overlays, wood embossing, glossy paint “dips,” and other techniques that most companies would never have thought of (but many now try to replicate).
He's doing all of that here in Ventura. The apartment we're sitting in, where Dill puffs on a spliff and sips tea from a large plastic cup, functions as an art studio and general creative space. In another lives his mother, whom he's been able to help support financially with the money he's made skating since he was 17, and her husband. The third is where he sleeps. There's a pile of collages he's made with scissors and glue on the table in front of us. Many of them will be scanned and applied to T-shirts, hoodies, and skate decks. He has people who help with that part.
“I don't even know how to scan,” he says. “I don't know how to Photoshop. I don't even know how to Dropbox. It doesn't work for me—all the fucking passwords.
“I'm just not good at normal shit. I don't sleep in a regular bed. I sleep on my mat. I'm not trying to be non-conventionalist, none of that. I never did all the shit you're supposed to do. Take care of your teeth. Do your taxes. All that shit. I'm outside living my weird little life, and that helps me make my thing go.”
Many of Dill's unusual habits are the result of his turbulent upbringing. From the time he was born till he reached 17, his family moved 22 times, into and out of various motels, trailer parks, and dingy apartments. “It turned me into this fucking gypsy, half-hobo, collector weirdo,” he says. When Dill was 8, he says, his father went to jail for possession of and intent to distribute cocaine, and his mother and half brother raised him from there. “It kind of made me, me,” he says. “But I could have dealt with a little less violence, a little less cocaine psychosis.”
Dill has always been an eccentric character. He has a magnetic personality. People often commented to me that he looks famous, and he does. Today he still rattles with the energy of a young skate rat, endlessly smoking, talking so fast he hardly finishes a thought before he's on to the next one, inevitably veering off into unpredictable tangents. But now, in his early 40s, he's developed an appealingly louche, legs-crossed nonchalance. Hip and sleazy, like a sturdier John Waters. He's intense and opinionated but weirdly personable and prone to sudden quasi-intellectual outbursts. He reads a lot, frequently name-dropping James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and countless other literary giants, incorporating nods to their work into Fucking Awesome's graphic designs.
At one point he asks if I've read Infinite Jest. I have not. “Did you try?” I did. “Anyone who says they understand Infinite Jest is totally full of shit, unless they think, ‘Oh, it's just a representation of the information age and how at one point we will just be shitting our pants and looking at the same thing on a screen over and over again.’ Coming to machines. Which is—from a long view, if you're an alien looking down—exactly what we're doing.”
He hasn't finished it either, but he does have a favorite David Foster Wallace short story. It's called “Forever Overhead,” a more manageable ten-pager about youth and nostalgia. It begins like this:
Skateboarding is inherently about youth. Even learning how to skate in the first place usually involves a level of carelessness with your body that only the young possess. To skateboard, no matter how old you are, is to channel whatever inner youthful energy you have left. And for Dill, whose memory is so powerful it seems to haunt him at every turn, adolescent nostalgia is uncommonly potent. Every skater who rides for the Fucking Awesome team gets a board with one of their old class photos turned into the graphic—Dill's and AVE's were the first ones. In the image of Dill, he's got a mane of wavy hair, protruding ears, and a barely perceptible shit-eating smirk. He's 13.
The same year his father went to jail, Dill wound up living down the street from pro skater Ed Templeton (who would go on to found the skate brand Toy Machine). “He changed my life,” Dill says. He started skating around then, at 8, and was 12 when he picked up his first sponsor, A1 Meats. By 1993, he had been recruited by street-skate pioneer Natas Kaupas to ride for 101 Skateboards, a scrappy offshoot of World Industries, which was indisputably the coolest thing on four wheels at the time. In 1998, his star on the rise, Dill made his way to Alien Workshop, where he would spend 15 years on the pro team, establishing himself as a truly original and gifted talent on a board.
Dill's years riding for Alien Workshop were transformative for him personally and for skateboarding at large. He moved to New York full-time in 1998, where a scene was crystallizing around the convergence of skateboarding, art, and fashion, and spent as much time hanging out with photographers, models, and graffiti writers as he did with skaters. By then, skateboarding was becoming a little less insular and a little more a part of the downtown culture that propelled the careers of artists like Ryan McGinley, Dan Colen, and Dash Snow. (A picture of Snow hangs in Dill's Ventura sleeping apartment.) When he works on designs for Fucking Awesome, Dill says, he's “like a fucking hamster,” an allusion, perhaps, to Colen and Snow's famous “hamster nest”installations, where they would lock themselves in a room for days, remove their clothes, ingest copious amounts of drugs, shred phone books, and roll around until they felt like hamsters. (Dill's art is featured prominently on the walls of the official Nest gallery installation that took place at Deitch Projects in 2007.)
In 2000, Alien Workshop released the seminal video Photosynthesis, a defining moment of Dill's career. He had the “last part,” meaning, simply, that the final minutes of the video belong to him. But what “last part” really means is that the most important section of the most important skate video of the 2000s is his. Bill Strobeck, the skate filmmaker who made Supreme's “Cherry” and “Blessed” videos, filmed the section. “He sees the world differently,” Strobeck tells me. “[Dill's] magnetic. He's like a rock star to me as far as skating goes, especially after Photosynthesis.” In that video, Dill displays all the hallmarks of a top-tier skater—he pops high, goes fast, flips the board with masterful control, and moves his body with commanding grace. But what stands out is his unique ability to imagine new possibilities, to see and do things that other skaters don't. In one famous instance, he picks up his board in the middle of a line, runs down a set of stairs, and then does another trick to end the clip. It was a small but significant break from convention, one that skaters still speak of with reverence today.
We take for granted now that fashion and art and skateboarding overlap, but Dill brought it all together like no one before him. In Photosynthesis he's skating through Lower Manhattan with a fluidity and ease that's alarming for anyone who's ever walked around south of 14th Street. He's wearing Helmut Lang and A.P.C., pointing a handheld Super 8 camera out the window of a moving van. And, Dill says, much of it was done on no sleep after drug-fueled nights of hard partying. The years spent making Photosynthesis may have been the greatest time of his life, he has said, but they were quickly followed by intense darkness and an eye-opening health scare.
The original seed for Fucking Awesome was planted back in 2001.
“Mikey [Piscitelli] said, ‘Look at [streetwear pioneer Shawn] Stussy. That guy made a bunch of money. Just do ‘Dill’ and it will make you money,’ ” Dill recalls. So they started making Dill-brand shirts, which sold at Supreme stores in New York and Japan. But soon they changed the name to Fucking Awesome, and Piscitelli sketched the logo—a little Misfits, a little Hulkamania—on a napkin. “When I named this company, I was 21,” Dill says. “I was out of my gourd. Fucking Awesome? That's the dumbest name. I think that's why I really strive to make this smart. Make it educated.” The early-aughts streetwear boom thrust Fucking Awesome into the hype blogosphere, and soon Kanye West was spotted wearing an all-over logo-print Fucking Awesome hoodie. “All of a sudden, our orders tripled,” Piscitelli says. “We didn't have the infrastructure. We had two dudes helping us that weren't even employees, just friends. I remember getting a shipment in, and they're like, ‘Where's the forklift?’ I was like, ‘What? I don't have a forklift.’ ”
For years, Dill explains, Fucking Awesome would go in and out of dormancy. “I saw at one point that if I even kept this up meagerly through the years, it could stick around. Because I'd be up and down on various drugs being the fun version of myself I thought I could be.” And the feedback was always intensely positive. Once, he recalls, he was stopped while walking down the Bowery by Supreme founder James Jebbia. “I had one of those really bad hangovers, and it was the last person I wanted to see, but he pulled up in his car. And he's like, ‘Your stuff looks great. It's a breath of fresh air in the store. Thank you.’ And I was so fucking astounded, I think I went around the corner and threw up.”
Piscitelli moved to Los Angeles to work on films while Dill remained in New York, enjoying the lifestyle and steady paychecks he'd earned by establishing himself as a marquee skateboarder. “He's still skating, but falling into the dark days,” Piscitelli recalls. “The party became darker.” In 2009, Dash Snow died of a reported heroin overdose, and Dill seemed dangerously close to a similar fate. That same year, a steady diet of Jameson with Percocet and Vicodin eventually caught up to him. “There were these times where it's just what you were supposed to do. You're young, you have some dough, you have no cares in the world,” says Piscitelli. “Things escalated until all of a sudden Dill was like, ‘Wow, I'm vomiting blood. My esophagus is not connected to my stomach anymore. Wonder how that happened?’ ”
Dill managed to pick himself up to call 911. He was hospitalized with a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. “That was a huge wake-up call for him,” Piscitelli says, “which led to him coming to L.A.”
In sunny Los Angeles, a new Dill began to take shape. He moved in with AVE, who was a few steps ahead of Dill on the road to recovery, having hit rock bottom with drug addiction himself. They traded in their crack pipes for protein shakes and started on a comeback that would ultimately lead to Dill landing a second Thrasher cover in 2011 and AVE winning a coveted Skater of the Year award in 2015.
When Dill quit Alien Workshop and took AVE with him in 2013, it was big news in the skate world, and that was the second beginning of Fucking Awesome.
“I didn't want to rust,” Dill says. “So how do you avoid rusting? You keep moving. So I had to leave. The owner of Alien Workshop, he was like my dad. So it felt like I had to move out of my dad's house. It was emotional. It was gnarly.”
In Los Angeles, I meet up with AVE and a crew of other FA skaters at Dan Tana's in West Hollywood for a team lunch. He's not built like your typical wiry pro skater. He's stocky and chiseled, with the demeanor of a construction foreman. Nothing like Dill.
“We can be like oil and water,” he tells me of their long friendship. But more often than not, they are as close as can be. “We both came from Orange County. We both have fucked-up, kinda funny backgrounds. There's a lot of similar experiences and ideas about the world.” AVE says that with skating he “always felt like it was going to end tomorrow, and I was gonna have to go get a job.” Owning and running a brand wasn't part of the plan. But when Dill called and told him he wanted to turn Fucking Awesome into a proper skate company with boards and all, he says, “I was like, ‘Fuck, that's a great idea. Let's do it.’ ”
The beginning was rocky. Then things got real bad.
“Almost everything that I was afraid of happened,” says Dill. The Fucking Awesome skate team grew rapidly—Alien Workshop teammates Kevin Terpening and Dylan Rieder joined. That was on top of an already explosive ensemble of young phenoms—including Tyshawn Jones, Na-Kel Smith, Sage Elsesser, Sean Pablo, Kevin Bradley, and Aidan Mackey—many of whom were on the Supreme skate team along with Dill. There was now a tremendous amount of talent on the roster, and a tremendous amount of responsibility for Dill, who had, essentially, never had a job. His drug habit, which was dormant but never fully kicked, started to creep back into his life.
“I totally focused on doing FA,” he says. “I got super fucked-up on drugs while I was doing it. I was looped out on Xanax and being a fucking nut.” At the same time, Dylan Rieder, a James Dean-like figure who was adored by the skate world and beyond for his good looks, smooth style, and uncanny skills on a board, became fatally ill with leukemia. AVE and Piscitelli saw Dill spiraling, so they planned an intervention with 25 of his friends.
“He was really overwhelmed and not doing well,” Piscitelli recalls. “I was just thinking, ‘He lost the fucking plot.’ Basically, 25 people told him he needed to get help. I think it woke him up.”
“That was tough,” Dill says. “No one should have an intervention. It's not fun. Everybody's sad. And crying. And telling you that they're afraid you're going to die. And you're like, ‘I'm sorry.’ ”
In 2018, Dill moved, along with his mother and her husband, to Ventura. City life just wasn't appealing anymore: “I'm not chasing pussy. I'm not trying to smoke crack and all that fun stuff. I have too much responsibility.” So he found this sleepy town on the coast, an hour's drive or so from Hollywood.
“Ventura,” he calls it, “the place where nothing happens all the time.”
We drive to dinner at one of his favorite local restaurants, a “Gastro-Bar” called Rumfish y Vino. Not exactly the vibe I was expecting, but this is Dill now. The intervention seems to have worked. “There were certain glass doors I had to walk through,” he says. “There was glass everywhere. I was so under the gun, and I was so afraid of failure. And I was so worried that anybody could ever tell me I didn't fucking do it.”
With that in mind, the name of the brand can be read two ways: There's “fucking awesome,” said sarcastically and cynically when, say, your quiet Christmas-morning coffee run is interrupted by some do-gooder with a point to prove. Then there's “fucking awesome,” said with earnest and enthusiastic the-world-is-yours tenacity, because life is an unpredictable sequence of events with boundless potential, and even those who risk everything, gastrointestinal system and all, can do it.
“I'm so much better,” he tells me. “Jesus Christ. I'm like a full-blown fucking adult nowadays.”
Noah Johnson is GQ's style editor.
A version of this story appears in the Spring 2019 issue of GQ Style with the title “Important Things Are Happening to Jason Dill.”
*Photographs by Michael Schmelling