Now, there was a time when wearing a pair of mitts was deeply uncool. Mitts were worn by 6 year old kids in ski lessons, or streaky teenagers who had just hired a board for the day with rubber bits on the end. The bigger and puffier the mitts, the more dorky.

Then, probably about 6 or 7 years ago, some people who could actually do tail grabs and land frontside 360s without reverting started wearing mitts.

There is a well-trodden pattern whereby creative people who pursued their dreams and thus haven’t got much money are forced to buy whatever is cheap / live wherever it is cheap. Because these people are cool, other people who are not cool copy them. And thus before you know it, you have bankers living in Dalston and riding on bikes with no gears.

I suspect that a similar economic necessity forced a group of Californian sofa-surfing committed shredders to raid the bargain bin at the end of the season, and they will have found that they could keep their hands warm for a fraction of the price if they were willing to wear the big puffy over-the-wrist mitts that would have hitherto only been seen on douchebags / skiers / their granddad.

The moment they hit the park, and started landing back lips and doubles, their skills immediately endorsed the mitt as a legitimate hand-warming form-factor. Several years later, anyone who is anyone is now rocking mitts, thereby reversing billions of years of evolution which found that fingers are actually quite useful, provided they are not all stuck together like seal fins.

Perhaps emboldened by the subsequent adoption of their douchebag chic by the everyman snowboarder, these very same shredders decided to push the boundaries of what they could get away with, by embracing all things dork in their sartorial choices (and thus saving a fortune in the process). As a consequence, snowboarding fashion has now mutated full circle to make beginners look like style icons.

Next up: Sunglasses being worn with helmets.