The Birth of Surf Style

Legendary surfer Joey Cabell linked with Breitling Surfer Squad member Kelly Slater to help reimagine a timeless timepiece for the modern age.

Paid Content from Breitling®

Breitling launched its first sea watch in the 1950s, just when the legendary Joey Cabell became the most iconic surfer in America. Now, this legend of the ocean has linked with Breitling Surfer Squad member Kelly Slater to help reimagine a timeless timepiece for the modern age: The Breitling Superocean Heritage ’57 Outerknown.

More than any other sport, surfing transcends competition. When surfing first traveled from the beaches of Hawaii to the shores of the mainland, it became an instant phenomenon and has remained a mythological piece of American culture and iconography. Maybe it was just timing: As the Baby Boomer generation matured into teenagers in the 1950s, they began to shape and shift culture to reflect their loves and passions like Rock ‘n Roll music, cars, movies, and fashion. At that exact moment in history, nothing captured the teenage imagination and ignited excitement quite like surfing.

Surf music, hot rods, and bikinis made their way to the silver screen and spread the sex appeal and cool factor of riding waves to places that barely even had lakes. Just as rock bands and Hollywood actors reached celebrity status, those early surf pioneers became bonafide surf gods in their own right. More than 60 years later, surfing still occupies a special place in the zeitgeist, not just in America but around the world from South America to South Africa to Australia to Japan and beyond.

Breitling has always been a brand for pioneers, and the stylish Breitling SuperOcean paired perfectly with the surfing lifestyle that sprang up on the California coast in the 50s and 60s. In fact, the original Breitling SuperOcean debuted in 1957—the same time a young surfer from the island of Oahu first arrived in Southern California and changed the sport forever.

That man, Joey Cabell, helped create the image of surfing as much as anyone who has ever dropped in on a wave, and paved the way for arguably the greatest professional surfer of all time, Kelly Slater. Now these two men have brought their cultural cache and passion for the water to a new type of timepiece: The Breitling Superocean Heritage ’57 Outerknown. Both the steel and two-tone steel and gold Limited Edition versions reimagine the classic 50s silhouette while retaining the details and styling—like the concave bezel and oversized indexes—that made the original watch so instantly iconic. 

Breitling has brought these two surfing legends from different eras together again, though they have had a relationship for more than 25 years. As one might expect, Cabell and Slater first met while riding boards. More unexpected? They were snowboards.

Why did these two surf gods first link up nearly 900 miles away from the nearest ocean waves? To fully understand that story, it helps to start at the beginning, when a young Joey Cabell was leaving Hawaii, and both Cabell and the Breitling SuperOcean were a few short years away from changing surfing forever.

The Surf King of Cool

Born in Honolulu, Cabell was three years old when he and his mother sailed with an evacuation convoy of ships back to the mainland after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Cabell returned to Oahu a few years later, where the highlight of each day was his morning school bus ride past the beaches of the veritable surf mecca that is Waikiki. As the bus rolled past the epic Pacific surf, Cabell would put his elbows on the windowsill as he gazed out at the surfers on their big, colorful wooden boards and dreamed that he could one day tame those very same waves.

“I decided at seven years old, riding the bus for second grade, I’m going to be that,” says Cabell, who still makes his home on Oahu. “And I committed myself on that bus ride and the passion was so strong. Nothing stopped me ever, because I always wanted to do and be that. It started with a commitment that was real and substantial.”

Young Joey spent his days sitting on benches underneath the banyan trees in front of the famous Queen’s Surf spot, offering shoeshines to American sailors pouring into port—no easy sell, given that shined shoes are part of the uniform. Determined to earn his way, Cabell embraced his inner hustler and managed to trick and scheme sailors on shore leave into giving up their dimes and quarters. Cabell and his native Hawaiian friends climbed trees to make coconut hats, then sold them to lei stands around Waikiki for tourists to buy, until one day he could finally afford a small paddleboard of his own.

From the first time he paddled out into the Pacific, it was clear there was something different about Joey Cabell. He practiced his skills against the literal surf royalty that lined up in the waters off Waikiki, and on the side worked as an auto mechanic to support his passion, later using his engineering skills to develop new boards and a completely distinct riding style that would usher in the next evolution of surfing.

But first, Cabell wanted an education. So he packed up his boards and sent his hand-built, fully customized 1932 Roadster hot rod—cherry red, perhaps to match his brightly-colored boards—on a barge to California. The next year was 1957, and just as the first Breitling SuperOcean made its debut, the teenage Cabell spent all his free time driving his hot rod from the beaches of Malibu down to the seaside towns in Orange County. There, he began making a name for himself as possibly the greatest surfer in the most important cultural decade in modern surfing history: the 1960s. 

More akin to a martial art than a sport, surfing is defined by style and respect. You needed the former in order to earn the latter, but before you could even begin to develop your unique style, you had to be accepted into the ‘lineup’ – the queue of surfers floating near the break where waves first form. As a new arrival in California, Cabell would wait his turn before attempting to ride the waist-high waves in the traditional style of the time.

“Especially with the local people, you have to be accepted there, earn respect,” says Cabell. “Style was a part of it because in those longboard days, you had to walk to the nose very gracefully; hang your toes over if you could. Then a nice, beautiful cutback, and you’d go up and down the wave. And it was all style, but it was technique too.”

Reared on the big, heavy waves in Oahu, the smaller surf in Newport Beach and Malibu were no match for Cabell’s incredible combination of balance, technique, and precision. His style was absolutely effortless and undeniably elegant, as he invented and refined a ‘down-the-line’ surfing strategy that mixed blinding speed with graceful movement and was unlike anything ever seen on the mainland. With his handsome face and toned body, and a personal aesthetic that blended preppy sweaters with surfwear like trunks and huarache sandals, it is no wonder that the boy from Hawaii with the bright red longboard sticking out of his roofless red roadster quickly became a local sensational.

The Modern Master

Two decades later and three thousand miles away, Kelly Slater rode his first waves in a far different environment than Joey Cabell. The Florida Coast in the 1970s was hardly a surfing hotspot, but a kid from Cocoa Beach could still fall in love with the sport just as much as a kid from Waikiki Beach. Slater was an athlete from an early age, and starred on the playing field in more typical Florida sports like football and baseball. But the image of surfing—one that Joey Cabell helped build—still reached all the way to the small beach community, where Slater first saw Hawaiian surf contests on television and soon began to devour every surfing magazine, film, or photo he could find.

“If somebody can be classified as obsessed about something, it was me with surfing,” says Slater.

The obsession clearly hasn’t stopped, given that the 48-year-old surfing superstar is recounting his early ocean-going years from a hotel room on a private island off the coast of Indonesia, where has been living for weeks in order to surf massive waves in the Indian Ocean. If Cabell made surfing a lifestyle, it is Slater that cemented it as a professional sport; inspiring multiple generations of riders with his immense power and utter dominance in surf contests across the world—including on Cabell’s native Oahu. Somehow, Slater and Cabell rarely crossed paths on Waikiki, or even on the infamous North Shore of Oahu, the birthplace of monstrous waves that can easily reach 40 feet and above. Instead, they first bonded on the side of a mountain in the thin air of landlocked Colorado.

That these two surf legends managed to meet in a place where every drop of moisture was frozen is a testament to the fact that both Joey Cabell and Kelly Slater are much more than just surfers. In fact, Cabell had all but left surfing behind by the time Slater was born in 1972—Cabell had fallen in love with the snowy slopes of Aspen and decided to open the first of his Chart House restaurants there in 1961. A decade later, Cabell was living happily in the altitude, applying his surf skills to the burgeoning sport that would become snowboarding. Slater visited the city in 1995, and thanks to some mutual friends, found himself up on the slopes with the elder statesman Cabell.

“I think Joey at the time was 60-whatever, but he was absolutely shredding,” says Slater, the awe and admiration palpable in his voice. “I couldn't believe the speed he was carrying. He was on a classic carve board and he was doing these turns where his face was almost touching the—well, I would say snow, but it was pretty much ice. I almost hurt myself really badly on that trip landing on ice!”

A great mutual respect deepened even further that weekend, and their lives, friends, and families still intertwine and overlap to this day. This despite the fact that, even beyond the age gap, there are many differences between the two. Slater’s power surfing style is a stark contrast to Cabell’s graceful cruising, and Cabell’s preppy Hawaiian aesthetic is nothing like Slater’s preferred wardrobe of simple surf shirts and shorts. But the innovative Cabell opened up the door for Slater to develop his own way of riding waves, and though Cabell’s fashion was a little more reflective of his era, both men wore shorts constantly so they could always be ready to paddle out at a moment’s notice if the waves were breaking just right. Moreover, both men started designing their own boards from the moment they first dipped a toe into the surf, and much like Cabell moved on from surfing into sports like snowboarding and skateboarding while becoming a restaurateur, Slater too has branched out as an actor in Hollywood and as an entrepreneur with several successful companies.

One of those companies is Outerknown, which Slater co-founded in 2015 as the first sustainable apparel brand to be certified by the Fair Labor Association before selling a single article of clothing. Outerknown is far from a vanity project to Slater, who has been deeply involved with everything from selecting textiles and visiting factories and facilities overseas to spearheading a brand ethos that is all about sustainability—especially when it comes to ocean conservation. Slater truly embodies the vision of the Breitling Surfer Squad and works closely with the brand to ensure it remains a #SquadOnAMission.

“I felt like I had an obligation there because of my history with the surf world,” says Slater. “We made it a point to work with Ocean Conservancy when we created this. We wanted it to be something broader than just hey, throw the name on something and go along with it. And it's been an exciting thing for Breitling itself.”

The two watches of the Superocean Heritage ‘57 Outerknown edition are part of the Breitling Superocean Heritage ‘57 capsule collection, but what makes these particular watches special lies in the design itself. Each strap is made from ECONYL® yarn, an innovative, 100% recycled and environmentally friendly material fashioned from abandoned fishing nets and other debris that can clog the ocean, ruin beaches, and wreak havoc on delicate ecosystems. This thoughtful and responsible process means that every Superocean Heritage ’57 Outerknown watch is both a part of Breitling and surfing heritage, as well as a part of the very ocean itself. Updated for the modern era, the Superocean Heritage ’57 Outerknown pays homage to surf style and its retro roots, while helping to preserve the sport’s fragile aquatic arena.

The best surfers recognize the awesome power of the water, and endeavor to work with the ocean instead of against it. For Slater and Outerknown, working with Breitling is a way to preserve his ‘office,’ as Slater often calls it, for future generations. For Cabell, who has dedicated endless hours to cleaning and preserving beaches in his beloved Oahu and all around the world, this is an opportunity to honor surf history and recall a time where riding waves was more than just a sport for him.

“It was a lifestyle,” says Cabell, before smiling and rephrasing. “It was my lifestyle.”