Man in His Domain: Keith Hufnagel

It wasn’t Keith Hufnagel’s idea to name his clothing brand after himself. Anne Freeman, his wife at the time, suggested it when they started the company back in 2002, even pushed for it. Hufnagel had been using his nickname, Huf, on his pro-model skateboard decks for some time, and his sponsors put it on T-shirts. He’d built a personal brand around the name already; it was only a matter of transferring it to his new venture. He felt sort of insecure about it, but he did it anyway. Although they later divorced, Freeman remained involved with the company until 2013, and the name she helped mint remains to this day.

“If you look out in the world, there are tons of brands with peo­ple’s names on them, and you may not even know who they are. Like, do you know who Louis Vuitton is?” Hufnagel asks me.

I do not, in fact, know who Louis Vuitton is or was, despite owning at least one of his purses, so I get Hufnagel’s point. You build a brand, time passes, and you as a person become just one helix in its DNA. Or at least that’s the goal. I do know who Keith Hufnagel is, however, and so do a lot of other people— mostly skateboarders and skateboarding fans but streetwear devotees too.

When I first interviewed Hufnagel, back in 2005, HUF was a small clothing line with just two stores in San Francisco, some very limited-edition sneaker collaborations and a lot of buzz. Almost 15 years later, we’re at HUF headquarters in down­town L.A., talking in his office, which is filled with clothing patterns and art pieces, including a giant pigeon sculpture by artist-skater and HUF collaborator Todd Francis. Hufnagel is wearing black twill HUF work pants, a white HUF-logo pocket T-shirt and Adidas shell toes.

This is where Hufnagel spends most days. On the floor, lean­ing against the wall is a large poster for the footwear company Lakai featuring a grinning blond boy carrying a tiny skateboard. “Keenan did some modeling,” Hufnagel tells me. His six-year-old son with his current wife, Mariellen, was named after Keenan Milton, a professional skateboarder who passed away in 2001. He was Hufnagel’s contemporary and best friend. About a year after Milton’s death, Hufnagel started HUF. He was 28 at the time.

Keith Hufnagel was born in New York City in 1974 to a nurse and a computer technician. He grew up in Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, an 80-acre post–World War II residential de­velopment bound by First Avenue to the west, 23rd Street to the north and 14th Street to the south. “Everyone in the neighbor­hood was skateboarding,” he tells me. “This group of kids used to hang out at Midtown Plaza, and they would skate in those little dead-end streets. We’d all ride, and I learned how to ollie. Then, for my 13th birthday, I got a real professional-style skateboard.”

From that day on, Hufnagel never stopped skateboarding. “It was a passion, or it was an addiction, whatever you want to call it,” he says. “It was my path.” Skateboarding was an entry point into a new community, into new geography. “The whole thing is social, because you’re meeting people and staying connected with them and going to skate their areas. I met Chris Keeffe in my area and then went out to Woodside, Queens and skated his area. Then I met Jon Buscemi and Gino Iannucci and went out to Long Island and hung with them. And then there’s Mike Her­nandez in the Bronx and Ryan Hickey in Brooklyn, and all of a sudden New York is no longer this small little city.”

New York in the early 1990s is a time of myth. Hufnagel’s scene included skaters who would become big names, such as Iannucci and Hickey, but also Brian Donnelly, the artist now known as KAWS, and filmmaker Harmony Korine, who im­mortalized the world of Hufnagel’s high school years with his screenplay for the 1995 film Kids, which featured other mem­bers of the scene: Justin Pierce, Leo Fitzpatrick and, most famously, Chloë Sevigny.

In 1992 Hufnagel packed up and moved to San Francisco, ostensibly to attend college but more to pursue skateboard­ing. “I saw California as the mecca for skateboarding,” he says, “and at that time San Francisco had the biggest scene. It was where all the footage was coming from.”

If New York is where Hufnagel found his passion, San Francisco is where he made that passion a profession. He turned pro half­way through his freshman year, joining a company called Fun Skateboards. He was skating all the time and traveling to film in Europe and Japan. Soon he had to make a choice. He chose his passion. He dropped out of school and kept skateboarding.

I ask him what “going pro” entails. “First you have to under­stand there are no actual rules in skateboarding,” he says. “If someone says you’re pro, you’re pro, which means your name goes on a skateboard and you get paid a royalty. You basically become your own brand.” When Fun Skateboards folded in 1994, Hufnagel was picked up by Real. For the next eight years, he built his brand. He moved to L.A., then back to San Fran­cisco, kept traveling the world, kept living his dream.

Historically, skateboarding has been a sport fundamentally about pleasure. Skateboarding is about freedom, adrenaline, creativity. Art has always played a crucial role: Most skate decks have boundary-pushing graphics designed by fringe and under­ground artists. Music too: Ask people from a certain generation how they discovered their favorite bands, and a common an­swer will be that they found them through skate videos. A lot of skateboarders became artists, musicians or filmmakers. Skate­boarding is a social organizer: You skate with your friends and hang out with other skaters. Skateboarding is a party. “You can go to a place, drink beer, skate all night,” Hufnagel says. “You can drink and smoke till four or five in the morning, pass out, wake up at four in the afternoon and do the same thing. Some­thing I always thought about is, How am I gonna keep the party going?” It was this question that planted the seed for HUF.

“When you go 10 years deep into skateboarding, you realize at some point that you can’t do this forever,” Hufnagel says. “I can skateboard forever, but I can’t travel the world and be at a profes­sional level forever.” He pauses. “I think you just want change too.”

And so Hufnagel began to think about change. In his travels he’d been exposed to the street culture in Japan and Europe. Sneaker collecting was becoming a big deal the world over. And Hufnagel was into all of it—the sneakers, the street art and, most of all, the clothing. He wore pieces from Supreme, Japanese brand Mad Hectic and Stüssy, which sponsored him. Off the board he wore limited-edition Nike Air Maxes. “People were just trading and finding out where things were,” he says. “This culture was really brewing.”

He wouldn’t say it himself, but Hufnagel has always been 23 defined by his style. He stood out as a skateboarder because of his powerful, fast and graceful physicality. To a lesser extent, he was known for his aesthetics. “He just dressed kind of fresh,” former HUF creative director Hanni El Khatib says. “When people think of him as a skateboarder, they definitely think of his style.” Hufnagel was so into clothing that in the late 1990s he did a six-month stint at the Fashion Institute of Technology, taking classes in design and pattern making.

And so HUF was born in a narrow side room in Hufnagel’s apartment in San Francisco. At the time, Hufnagel was at the height of his skateboarding career, still riding for Real and landing ollies higher than heaven. He and Freeman opened the first HUF store on Sutter Street as a sort of marketplace for all the things he’d discovered and coveted on his travels. They mainly carried sneakers, and because of Hufnagel’s connections they often had the rarest limited-edition Nikes. They also offered clothing from Supreme, P.A.M., Stüssy and Mad Hectic, as well as skate decks and KAWS figurines. And from day one, they made their own T-shirts, with big HUF logos on them.

T-shirts led to an entire line of clothing that was immediately popular with industry tastemakers. But it was their Plantlife socks—athletic socks with an all-over pot-leaf print, designed by El Khatib—that reached a broader audience. They were created half-jokingly as a conversation starter to get girls at parties. (Hufnagel doesn’t really smoke weed.) But they took off after members of the rap group Odd Future, who frequented the brand’s first L.A. store, started wearing them; the socks became one of the best-selling items in HUF history.

Artist collaborations were an early and enduring part of the brand. Barry McGee, Cleon Peterson, Chloé Kovska and other artists have all done their first clothing designs with HUF. I ask Kovska what HUF offered that interested her. “The freedom to breathe,” she replies. “They didn’t have a problem with risqué imagery, weed or nudity. I could just be myself with them. Nothing was a bad idea.”

HUF’s aesthetic crystallized early on. Ultimately, it’s rooted in the founder himself: his history, his tastes, his reputation— and his undying love of skateboarding. HUF is not a core skate brand, but it’s not purely a streetwear brand either. Skateboarding anchors it. Hufnagel wants HUF to have a skate team no matter what. He wants skaters to wear HUF clothes. “Our roots come from skateboarding, so we’re always going to sup-port skateboarding, one way or another,” he says. “We’re going to have a team, we’re going to do tours, we’re going to put people in the clothes, we’re going to embrace who they are and help them excel in skateboarding.”

In the past 17 years, HUF has gone from a company with a few T-shirt designs to a globally recognized streetwear brand. There are 13 HUF stores, and the company’s signature wares are carried in 59 countries. After a 2018 womenswear soft launch, there are plans to widely release the line to reflect the significant presence of women in the sport. Although HUF’s growth has included several sets of outside investors (it’s currently majority owned by Japanese company TSI Holdings, which is also the parent company of Lakai), Hufnagel has stayed on in varying capacities the entire time. His current title is chief creative officer, and he goes to the office every day.

With the sport of skateboarding changing so much in the past two decades, has Hufnagel ever struggled to stay true to his roots? No, he says, because he doesn’t think the skateboarding mind-set ever truly changed. “We don’t care what people think,” he says. “We’re gonna do this because we love it. It creates a culture. The kids involved in it are fresh; they’re creating new fashion styles. Kids who are skateboarders are walking down runways for Louis Vuitton. That’s pretty fucking amazing.”

At first I thought Hufnagel’s main motivation was to protect his legacy—the Louis Vuitton–ification of his name. But by all accounts, he has little ego. The more I talk to him, the clearer it becomes that what really keeps him showing up day after day is something else entirely. It’s to protect, to be the caretaker of the skateboarding ethos. He doesn’t view this as an obligation but as a privilege. Skateboarding gave him friends; it gave him a career, the opportunity to travel, a purpose, a name. “Now I’m in the business of apparel and watching skateboarders grow,” he says. “I’ve continued the same path, but I’ve just changed positions. I never had to leave skateboarding.”

At the age of 45, Hufnagel may not be drinking beers till four a.m. or landing huge tricks, but he’s definitely still at the party. He still skateboards every day. “I’m not throwing myself down stairs, but I still have fun going out and just basically skating three blocks and getting a coffee,” he says. Is it still as much fun as it was when he was a teenager? He nods. “It’s freedom. Freedom to roll fast, to get around easy. I mean, you can grab a fucking Bird scooter and do that, but you may not look that cool.”