Sean Pablo fidgeted. The 25-year-old supreme figure skater recently moved, back to his teenage bedroom in Los Angeles, because he wanted to get away from New York. When we talked in early March, he was relaxing somewhere in Florida, because he wanted to escape from LA. Professional skaters are nomads by trade, and Pablo has been going back and forth between the two coasts since he was 14 years old. He is ready to see something new and strange for once.
“I always knew I wanted to get out of there,” he told me over the phone, referring to the LA neighborhood where he grew up. And even though he’s back now, that could also change a lot. “I wanted to move down to Miami or something because, I don’t know, LA and New York, it’s just too many of the same ideas being spread around. Everyone is just kind of circle splashing each other.
It’s been almost nine years since the 2014 Supreme video “Cherry” set 14-year-old Pablo on his way to becoming a professional figure skater. Speak ARRIVE GQ back in 2020, Pablo’s close friend Chloë Sevigny placed him in the tradition of stylish, handsome skaters whose charisma takes them beyond the sport: “Everybody people just like them,” she said. “There is a mystery and a nuance, and obviously beauty is also very seductive.”
Courtesy of Sandy Kim for Paradise
While he remains the most dreamy guy on the Supreme team, Pablo is now at a crossroads. In a published interview IN 032c magazine This week, he detailed his rehabilitation after a street skating accident broke his tibia last summer. He was injured in a previous incident and eventually led him – guided by his friend, filmmaker Harmony Korine – to seek treatment for his painkiller abuse. “The way to heaven begins with hell,” the famous adage of Dante Alighieri, has become Pablo’s new mantra. This makes sense for several reasons, the least important of which is that his nearly eight-year-old streetwear brand — which he co-designed with his father — also happens to be called Paradise.
inside Latest Paradise NYC collection, which comes online this week, the team relies on many of the same deep-fried symbols they have in the past: naughty Disney characters, Catholic icons, various New York symbols. But this time, it’s all just a little…Heaven is lost. There’s a hoodie with Mickey Mouse wearing a halo showing his fingers. (After all, Disney, billed as the happiest place on Earth, can be a real nightmare.) A pair of sweatpants emblazoned with the image of the Virgin Mary crying blood. Another t-shirt, emblazoned with a cute Bambi illustration and the words “FUCK EVERYTHING,” is an excerpt from a previous version that reads “HAPPY EVERTHING.”
Pablo admits the designs are crap. “The Jurassic Christ is my favorite movie,” he laughs. “I think everyone wants to create something completely original, and I want to play with that idea a little bit and just poke it, you know what I mean? It’s almost like people might say, ‘Is he stupid? Doesn’t he understand it’s just a complete hoax?’ And it was a little joke, I guess.”
