Whether or not you’ve ever touched a board in your life, chances are there are three names in surfing you know: Mick Fanning. Kelly Slater. Stephanie Gilmore. Fanning punched a shark. Slater is the overall world title record-holder. And Gilmore is the GOAT— you’d be hard pressed to argue otherwise.
After joining the professional tour ranks in 2007, a then-19-year-old Gilmore became the first surfer—male or female—to claim the world title in her rookie year. She went on to win three more consecutive titles (in 2008, 2009 and 2010) followed by two more in 2012 and 2014. In 2018, she nabbed her record-tying seventh world title (sharing the record with fellow Aussie, Layne Beachley). Then, in 2022, she took out her eighth title, making her the league’s most decorated female surfer in history and landing her the second-most title wins of all time (bested only by Slater). Somewhere between all of that, she starred in a feature-length documentary (Stephanie in the Water), competed at the Tokyo Olympics, scored five perfect tens and was inducted into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame. Then, in January 2024, Gilmore announced she would be taking a 12-month break from competitive surfing.
I catch her nearly a year on from her exit from the pro circuit. Speaking over Zoom from the passenger seat of her car, Gilmore is warm, relaxed and surprisingly open—perhaps the marker of a year off but, if previous profiles of the surfer tell me anything, it’s that that is her default state.
“I just absolutely adore being on tour,” she says. “I love the sport. I love the ups and downs. I love the travelling. It really is the most wonderful life that anyone could live, so 17 years went pretty quick.”
“I think in the last couple of years, after I won the eighth title, I feel like I realised, ‘Oh, it’s actually really energy-draining and it’s a lot to commit yourself to try and win these titles,” Gilmore explains. “I wanted to take the year off and explore what else I could do with my surfing and my career outside of the jersey.”
She’s spent the better part of the year travelling, having linked back up with Rip Curl—a brand she first signed with in 2000, when she was only 12-years-old—to embark on The Search. A re-launch of a project the company started in the ‘90s, The Search sees Rip Curl send surfers around the world to, in their words, “feel that freedom and to discover the most exceptional waves, adventures, and experiences.”
In May, Gilmore journeyed through Indonesia, discovering breaks she had never surfed before. “I got to surf and got to hang out with [fellow surfers] Tom Curren and Mason Ho and really, just got re-introduced to the brand in this way,” she says. “It was so much fun.”
“When you’re on Tour, you’re so focused on the events that you’re not really looking around at surfing some novelty waves, or trying to find places that you would normally go out,” she explains. Gilmore’s admiration of Curren and Ho is evident (she describes them as “one of “the most stylish surfers of surf history” and “Hawaiian royalty,” respectively) and she notes that a highlight of the trip was, “Just spending time with people who you don’t usually get time to get know who they are, and have interesting conversations about music or travel or life … and surfing in between as well,” she says. “I just really cherish it.”
Gilmore’s sabbatical has also offered ample time for reflection—on the evolution of the sport she holds so close, the role of women within it and how her definition of success has changed as she has ascended the ranks of surfing celebrity.
"when you're the best in the world, nothing actually physically changes. I don't have a magic superpower or something after that"
“In the beginning I just knew I had this love of surfing and I totally was compelled to chase after this dream of having the most. I’m a competitive person, so I wanted to see if I could win the most. And so in the beginning, I just felt like it was so fun and easy and new—it’s like a sparkly new toy, you know? Like, I get this trophy and I’m the best in the world,” Gilmore tells me. “But as time goes on, you start to realise, ‘Oh, okay, so when you’re the best in the world, nothing actually physically changes. I don’t have a magic superpower or something after that.’”
She adds, “You start to actually ask yourself those questions of like, ‘what is it that I enjoy? What can I do with this platform?’”
Don’t get her wrong: “It’s a great feeling to set this goal and to put in the hard work and chase that dream, and then finally get there—it feels great,” she says, but “Now, I’ve got this a great platform to be able to do great [things] with, and that’s to share the stoke of surfing and also to encourage more women to get it to the ocean.”
While she’s long been the idol of many young surfers, stepping away from the Tour meant Gilmore could really, consciously step into the role of a role model.
“To have a great role model who can be a World Champion, but [is] also just encouraging [you] to get in the surf, no matter what level you’re at—that was something that I thought was a cool role that I can step into,” she says. In addition, “making great changes for the women on tour to try and get equal prize money and to really just be a leader in that sense, it’s been super important,” Gilmore adds. “That’s what those trophies can do—they’re more than just another cool trophy on the mantelpiece.”
Since Gilmore joined the tour in 2007, the world of women’s surfing has been wiped out, ragdolled and remodelled.
Gilmore recalls the early days of her career, where women “were always the side show to the men,” and how much has changed in the near-two decades since. “Now it feels like there’s so much good energy about the growth of women’s sport, and it’s coming from the men as well,” she reflects. “It used to be like ‘Oh, it’s onshore and shitty. Let’s put the girls on.’ But now it’s like, ‘Okay, the waves are firing. We’re going to put the women on, then we get to put the men on, then we’re going to go back to the women.”
"it feels like there's so much good energy about the growth of women's sport, and it's coming from the men as well"
The World Surf League (WSL) committed to the closure of its gender pay gap in 2018, announcing that from the 2019 season, every WSL-controlled event would award equal prize money to male and female athletes, making it the first US-based global sports league—and one of the first in the world—to offer equal prize money across the board.
But it’s not just in the sport where the tide has changed. The media and corporate worlds are catching up, too. In addition to the WSL’s announcement, Gilmore notes she’s seen a change with female surfers “getting more time in the press, more stories being told,” in addition to further support from surf companies.
Recently, Steph graced the cover of Tracks, celebrating the iconic surf magazine’s 600th issue. The surfer’s bible dubbed her the “surfer of the new millennium,” covering its anniversary edition with a snap of Gilmore doing what she does best—carving.
It’s a sharp pivot from the way women were portrayed in the magazine’s past. In its coverage of Gilmore’s issue, The Guardian reported that the mag’s decade-old, now-archived website featured a sub-menu dedicated to ‘girls’—and not girl’s surfing but rather, “poster girls” and, the outlet reports, “someone called Miss Bintang.”
“There’s no doubt that women’s surfing is in a really exciting phase at the moment, the women’s surfers are making giant leaps and bounds in terms of performance and also their presence on the world stage, and we thought it was important to have a woman on the cover to reflect that,” Tracks editor Luke Kennedy told the newspaper.
Kennedy’s sense of the moment is one Gilmore echoes: “I think the main thing for me is that I’ve seen women surfing as a whole [increase]—not even just professional surfing, but the numbers of women have grown like crazy. Every single beach I go to around the world is packed with women in the water.”
The visibility is increasing on all levels. Gilmore reflects on her youth when, as a grom, she looked up to the era’s leading female surfers like Layne Beachley, Chelsea Hedges and Sofía Mulánovich. There were, she muses, “so many women who, they were there, but they weren’t like on the cover of the magazines and stuff. It was always like, occasionally you’d get a photo.”
Now, things couldn’t be more different. “All of the women on Tour are such great role models and such cool women to look up to—so powerful and fierce and just really great athletes,” Gilmore says. “I really love surfing for that reason, because it’s such a cool balance between being an athlete, but being … cool—like surfing is just a really nice sport like that.”
As frivolous as it may sound, there is no way to talk about surfing separate from its connection to culture and, by extension, style. Despite—or perhaps, because of—its long-standing ambivalence to fashion, surfing has become an omnipresent reference point for contemporary design. On the runways in Paris and Milan (and in glossies around the world), surfboards, boardshort-style cut-offs and neoprene dresses have been used by brands in an attempt to communicate (effectively or not) an unquantifiable, effortless cool factor. It goes without saying that it fails, because what makes surf-brand gear cool is the fact that its wearer has probably thought very little about whether or not it is cool.
“It’s funny, because surfing seems to always be on trend, even in high fashion. Like surfing always seems to be slipped in these runway shows and stuff, they always seem to reference it in some way, shape or form,” says Gilmore.
Instead of rolling her eyes or brandishing the European copycats as Kooks, Steph—who, as has been well documented, is consistently optimistic—is enthused by the referencing. She tells me: “I thought that that was really cool because it obviously shows how cool of a sport [surfing] is, and that people are always curious about it and want to be involved in it, whether they surf or not.”
"Rip Curl is ... the ultimate surf company, so that was something that I wanted to make sure we stayed genuine to"
On what makes it so special, she muses, “I think the surfers themselves didn’t really care about fashion, it was just kind of like, ‘Shorts and a shirt, whatever, I just want to go to the beach. I don’t care what I’m wearing.’ But I think the laid back feeling and that ease of it all … that became the coolest part about it.”
Across the decades, the only brands who have really succeeded at encapsulating the essence of surf culture are the ones rooted in it, like Rip Curl, who Gilmore teamed up with for her first-ever fashion collaboration.
“I really adore surf history and surf culture, and Rip Curl has an amazing archive of all their logos and all the cool images of all the surfers back in the day. ‘70s surf is my favourite era, so I went back through the Rip Curl archive and just pulled out some cool images and just the colourways they used to use.”
“Rip Curl is a surf company, the ultimate surf company, so that was something that I wanted to make sure we stayed genuine to,” she says.
Peppered with retro nods and infused with that ease for which she and her contemporaries are known, the collection is an apt souvenir from the first year of the eight-year, multi-million dollar deal she signed with the brand pre-Search—her year off.
“The year went by so quickly,” she says of her sabbatical, and time as part of the Search. “Now I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I feel like there’s so much more to do that might take me a whole ‘nother year to get it all in.”
Naturally, that brings us to the question on the lips of every surfing fan in the world. Will she return to the tour next year? She cracks a smile. “We’ll see. Maybe I’ll end up back. I haven’t decided yet.”
The Stephanie Gilmore Collection is now available to shop via Rip Curl. Check out the full range here.
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