In the 1970s, surf wear brand Ocean Pacific’s clothing – specifically OP’s super-short corduroy shorts – was worn by just about every Southern California surfer or skater; the unofficial uniform of the counterculture then seeped out to the rest of the world.
The apparel brand’s co-founder, Jim Jenks, who started the clothing line after recognizing the need for a better performance surf short while catching waves, died on Sunday, March 19, in his San Diego home. He was 84.
“OP invented the big marketing and broad distribution of surfing and apparel,” said Ian Cairns, an early-era championship surfer. “OP just took that surf marketing thing and made it big. Ocean Pacific was all about California, surf, beach lifestyle. It’s pretty incredible.”
Ocean Pacific was started as a surfboard brand in the ’60s by John Smith, it was later sold to Don Hansen of Hansen’s Surf Shop. Jenks, who worked as a shop rep, wanted to launch a clothing line in the ’70s for surfers and with Hansen created the Ocean Pacific apparel brand.
OP was a dominant brand in the 1970s and 1980s, “fusing sports, music, art and fashion with beach culture,” the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach said in its recognition of Jenks as the “Surf Culture” inductee in 2017.
Jenks, at the Walk of Fame induction, said if it wasn’t for retailers, the business never would have been successful.
“Our brand literally exploded, our business was building every single year. Things were going big fast. There was really no one out there doing this stuff,” Jenks later recalled. “All of a sudden, there were surf movies, surf music. We were lucky we were on that wave.”
Surf brand Hang Ten was already making apparel, said Peter “PT” Townend, executive director of the Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum, but few others were catering to surfer’s styles in the early ’70s. He sat down to interview…
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