The sun is rising over Harlem as Tyshawn Jones crosses St. Nicholas Avenue, sidesteps a police cruiser, hops up over a curb, and extends his hand. The guy more and more people are saying is the world’s most important skateboarder is here, in the neighborhood where he was born 26 years ago, to talk about his role as a “Friend of the House,” an honorific conferred on him earlier this year by Pharrell Williams, men’s creative director of the biggest luxury brand in the world, Louis Vuitton. But Jones is specifically here, at the corner of St. Nick and 145th Street, to talk about something else. Something that happened three stories beneath where we’re standing. The moment that made him an icon. Jones’s legs and feet are oddly unscarred for a pro skater. He has a lithe build and large, alert eyes. In casual settings, his voice has no edge. There’s an echo of old New York (“New Yawk”), but his cadence is slower, a trace of his Caribbean roots. This morning he wears no Louis Vuitton—just sweat shorts, a sleeveless undershirt, Adidas clogs without socks, and a “Free Durk” hoodie, commemorating the imprisoned Chicago rapper. The A/C/B/D subway steps are blackly dotted with old chewing gum and strewn with butts and trash. One floor below us, and one floor above the platform where Jones made history, there’s a long, fluorescent-lit room that is home to NYPD Transit Command 3, a police station. Skateboarding is listed under disorderly conduct in the NYC Transportation Authority’s nine-page rule chart. Stipulation §1050.7 prohibits “riding or otherwise standing on a skateboard” in any transit-system facility. Violators are subject to a quality-of-life summons, and the same fine as defecating. Photo equipment, amplified music, recording devices, smoking, and alcohol are also banned, as is climbing down into the tracks. Transit cops really hate when people do that. We walk down more stairs, then out onto the hot, smelly, slippery subway platform where Jones and a crew of associates made history. “That was a long night,” Jones says, taking down his hood to reveal elaborate braids and a diamond earring. “We were like 12 deep.” And by morning—despite interruptions by rats, cops, trash trains, film poachers, concerned commuters, and a homeless guy screaming, “Tony Hawk!”—they’d created one of the most iconic images in street culture. Whatever street culture means, it includes skateboarding, which appeared in Southern California circa 1960 and was subsequently banned in 20 American cities. And it absolutely includes “street skating” (then called “street style”), which emerged in parkless New York City circa 1980 and slowly intertwined with another of modern history’s greatest artistic movements, the Bronx-born subculture that became known as hip-hop. Halfway down the platform, we stop. This is where Jones kickflipped the 145th Street subway tracks. The gap was 13-feet wide, with 12-inch mats of “blind bumps”—the raised plastic nubs designed to alert vision-impaired or merely inattentive commuters of their proximity to the platform edge—on both sides. To get this trick, Jones would have to pop up at an angle, flip and then catch the board with his feet, clear this gap without hitting a pillar or the platform edge, land on the other side, then roll away clean. (The nubs made this last part that much harder.) It took over six hours and 200 tries, and by the end he couldn’t walk. He would sprint down the corridor, jump on his board, buttonhook right, fly over the tracks, land, fall, and tumble into the arms of three catchers, so he didn’t fall into the next set of tracks. Then a friend would carry him back across the tracks (to save his legs) and he’d reset for the next attempt. Skate photographer Atiba Jefferson and filmer Bill Strobeck spent six hours down on the tracks in ankle-deep mud crawling with rats, waiting to get the shot, while Jones bailed again and again and again and again. At one point, scrambling up onto the platform as a train approached, Jefferson cut his hand. Eventually, as the subway cars began to fill with morning commuters, even Jones considered giving up. “No,” Jones recalls Jefferson saying. “This is the craziest photo I have ever shot. You have to do this. That definitely pushed me.” He adds, “This is Atiba Jefferson. He’s been shooting photos for 30 years. He’s saying, ‘Please make this.’ It’s almost like, you can’t give up.” Thirty minutes later, with at least one curious MTA official now among the assembled onlookers, it happened. What he did exactly—or how he did it—he can’t say. Like most physical geniuses, he’s blind and mute to his gift. “I just pulled one out,” he says. “Rolled away.…” The flip was a never-been-done (an “NBD,” in skate parlance) and the shot got the cover of Thrasher (aka the Bible). The image—like Tony Hawk’s 900 or Rodney Mullen’s viral “liminal” video—transcended skateboarding the way almost nothing does in this new American pastime. It’s like a picture of the intersection of two worlds: The dark abyss of dirt and tracks and industrial grit under the yellow-edged subway platform, and the world above it, bright and linear, roofed with fluorescent lights, pipes, and surveillance equipment cased in steel. Connecting the two are a succession of vertical steel beams marked with “145 Street” signs. Anything painted is orange or yellow, and anything unpainted is black. Everything looks dirty. The air looks dirty. The vanishing point at the center of the frame is a cavelike, square black hole where the tracks enter the tunnel, and everything in the image appears to move toward it as if we’re staring down a drain. Everything, that is, except Tyshawn Jones, who’s perfectly centered, sailing over the gleaming tracks, his torso curved in a C with his legs extended, like a martial artist in mid-strike. One hand out ahead, aligned with the very front of the board, and the other extended toward the camera, closed in a loose fist. He wears a durag, hoodie, shorts, and ruined white sneakers. His back foot has just found the still-flipping board, while his front is still angled in post-flick finesse. The Hardies logo is printed on his grip tape, adorned with a solidarity fist. He’s looking not at the board but at the spot where the board will land—a microsecond from now, on a bed of hard raised bumps made to stop him—and roll away. “To me, Atiba’s shot is not just an iconic image—it’s a window into a new world,” Rodney Mullen says. Mullen, 59, is known as skateboarding’s “Godfather” (which makes him uncomfortable). As a teenager, he invented the kickflip and flat-ground Ollie, and got the cover of Thrasher for doing so. “Ollie, kickflip, 360 flip—those things were invented in a very controlled environment,” says Mullen, who grew up in skate-park-rich Florida. “What Tyshawn does now was unimaginable back then, but now look where he’s doing this—it completely resets the bar. What Tyshawn and his superpowers bring into our community creates a new paradigm, so we’re forced to rethink not just what is possible on a skateboard, but what is possible.” Soon, non-skaters were stopping Jones to ask for photos. They wanted to meet the guy who could fly. The guy who could fly met Pharrell Williams a few months after the Thrasher cover dropped, at a Nobu dinner following one of Williams’s Joopiter auctions. Williams, who’d just stepped into the men’s creative director job at Louis Vuitton, would soon designate Jones as a Friend of the House. It’s a title he shares with the likes of Bradley Cooper and the star soccer midfielder Jude Bellingham, handpicked ambassadors to the fashion world from the fields in which they excel. Jones has met other Friends at runway shows and at LVMH headquarters in Paris, where he recently shot publicity photos announcing his Friend of the House status—Jones Ollie’ing three undoubtedly-very-expensive Vuitton trunks in front of Louis Vuitton headquarters on the Rue du Pont-Neuf. He’s still learning about his role, and what it means he can ask for. “Can I go into an LV store and just grab stuff? No, it doesn’t work like that,” he says. “You have to ask for things in advance and they’ll possibly get it to you. And they’ll say yes or no? “Uhhhmmm,” he says, with a rare chuckle. “They take care of me.” Have they ever said no? “I mean…they haven’t. But they’re a big brand and they have to source things.” Before this job, Jones didn’t know Williams personally. But he knew Louis Vuitton, and understood the brand’s reach; his mother and grandmother collected Louis bags. Jones had known Louis Vuitton’s previous creative director, Virgil Abloh. When Abloh died suddenly in 2021, at 41, he and Jones were in the mock-up stage of a collaborative project between Abloh’s Off-White and Jones’s company Hardies, which makes hardware—literally nuts and bolts—for skateboards. “He was a cool dude,” Jones says of Abloh. “He was doing stuff with Lucien Clarke.” Clarke, the Jamaican-born NYC skater, walked in Abloh’s first LV show in 2018. Two years later he and Abloh collaborated on the design for the first-ever Louis Vuitton skate shoe, something of an NBD for both fashion and skateboarding. Born in Chicago to Ghanaian parents, Abloh had grown up steeped in 1990s street culture—DJ’ing, skating, making T-shirts, and collecting pieces of what was just starting to be called “streetwear.” The street-skating influence Abloh brought to the house lives on through Jones. His first Louis Vuitton ad referenced iconic footage of New York skaters—one in Timberlands—flipping the heavily tagged Jersey barrier at the Brooklyn Banks, a legendary spot at the Brooklyn Bridge’s landing and an epicenter of NYC street culture starting in the ’80s. In the video, Jones flips over a similarly high rail, then lands on a steep bank of cobblestones, and rolls away—in Timbs screened with the LV logo. “It was pretty gritty, for sure,” Jones says of the scene. “But that was actually [shot] in Paris.” Jones first skated the Banks when he was 10, in 2008, the year his mom bought him a board at Target. From there it was pretty much on. Obsessed, he asked older kids for their used boards, stole sneakers, and did anything he could “so I could keep pursuing.” Within two years he was sponsored by NYC’s New Breed Skateboards, and the same year he was “flowed” (i.e., supplied with free product) by Toy Machine—a company founded by pro skater and photographer Ed Templeton, known for spotting talents like Chad Muska and Bam Margera. Around this time Jones first met with Supreme. Before long he would become almost literally the face of the brand; he's one of two skaters (along with Na-kel Smith, a South Central LA–born skater who now rides for Jones’s King and Hardies brands) pictured on the cover of Supreme, a coffee table book about the brand published by Phaidon Press in 2020. Jones’s relationship with Supreme ended last September, after Jones appeared in an ad for Marc Jacobs, wearing the Japanese design impresario Nigo’s reimagining of the iconic Superman sweater from Jacobs’s 1990 men’s collection. Supreme would later claim that Jones had violated the terms of his Supreme endorsement agreement by modeling for another brand. In May, Jones filed a $26 million lawsuit against Supreme, alleging wrongful contract termination. The suit alleges that Supreme had raised no concerns when Jones, who’s been repped by DNA Models since 2019, had modeled for other brands in the past. The suit asserts that the company disparaged Jones within the industry and that Supreme had terminated his contract in order to cut costs in the wake of a recent acquisition. (In 2020, Supreme was sold to VF Corp, the brand conglomerate that owns Vans, Dickies, The North Face, and Timberland, for $2.1 billion. Last year VF sold it for $1.5 billion—or $600,000,000 less—to EssilorLuxottica, the French and Italian multinational holding company that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley.) In early August of this year, attorneys for Supreme filed a motion to dismiss Jones' suit, asserting that “apparel exclusivity was the sine qua non" of Jones' agreement with Supreme, and that the Marc Jacobs/Nigo ad constituted a “clear violation” of that agreement. Among the exhibits entered into evidence was Jones' Supreme contract, which stipulated that Jones would be paid $83,333.33 per month "to prominently wear a SUPREME branded top (e.g., shirt, tank, sweatshirt, button-down, sweater or jacket), pants and underwear every day.” Jones' initial complaint against Supreme asserts that Supreme had “consistently” told Jones and his representatives that "so long as you’re not doing anything for another skate[boarding] brand, or a skateboarding team, we don’t have a problem with it, and don’t want to stand in the way of you making money.” Can Jones talk about any of this? “No,” he says, and waits for the next question. This all points to what is unprecedented about a Tyshawn Jones. He raises questions no one has needed to ask before: Is Supreme still a skate company? Does Tyshawn Jones’s presence in an ad make Marc Jacobs, technically, a rival skate company? Does his Friend of the House status now make Louis Vuitton a skate company? Or does it signal that Tyshawn’s own brand—like that of Michael Jordan, the non-skate athlete few stories about Jones can resist invoking—has officially outgrown the “skate” qualifier? Jones knows a thing or two about brands. He’s founded three of them—King, Hardies, and the underwear-and-apparel company Brick Underneath—and now works for the biggest one in the world. “Before I ever picked up a skateboard, I knew what LV was,” he says. “It’s a cultural phenomenon. So, for me, to start skateboarding, and for them to continue as the biggest brand in the world, and then for them to embrace skateboarding, which brought us together, is pretty insane.” We’re still in the subway, now at the exact place where he left the ground and took to the air. His crew painted the spot with Bondo industrial epoxy to ensure a smoother takeoff; you can still see the trowel marks. No one Bondo’d the other side of the tracks, so Jones had to land on the bumps, which hurt just to stand on. Today skaters visit the spot like pilgrims, to add their tags and linger. This morning, Jones can’t hang out much longer. He has to be at a photo studio downtown to shoot from eight until five. Then he’ll go skateboarding. Beyond that? His current plans are to film for a 2026 video, stay hands-on with his companies, maybe open a new restaurant (he recently closed his first one—Tastes So Good, a Caribbean spot on Lafayette Avenue in the Bronx—when the lease ran out), and shop for property in a Jersey area so prestigious most people can’t even find out when houses there go on sale. And to see what the future holds with Pharrell and Vuitton. “For them to embrace this culture…. I mean, some people in skateboarding might not necessarily like things that aren’t, per se, skateboard brands—but I think it pushes the narrative forward,” Jones says. “Which only makes the culture bigger, which makes skateboarding benefit, essentially.” Recently Jones sponsored a skater named Ari Misurelli, who was born in 2012. “He was just a young kid, ripping around New York,” Jones says. “He’s at that age where you love skating so much that it’s all you want to do. Nothing else.” Jones started flowing him hardware, and boards from his deck company, King. “I want you to put your crown on,” Jones told Misurelli at a sesh. They both laughed, but a month later Misurelli reached out. “Were you serious?” he wrote. “I would love to get boards.” “I got you,” Jones told him. “Let’s do it.” PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Jesse Lizotte Grooming by Barry White for barrywhitemensgrooming.com