Nick Tershay AKA Nick Diamond

Who is Nick Tershay? Have you seen his work? Ever heard of the Tiffany Dunk? Or Perhaps you’ve seen Lil Wayne, Lupe Fiasco, Rick Ross, Alchemist or Curren$y wearing a Diamond T-shirt.

How does it feel to have the person who some people regard as the "Michael Jordan" (Paul Rodriguez) of Skateboarding representing your company?
Paul is great and I have known him since he first started getting good at skating. Joey Suriel who is now the Team Manager of Diamond actually was the first one to sponsor Paul back when Joey was skating for Kareem Campbell’s company City Stars. Paul has been skating for Diamond for a long time now and we are actually droppin’ A collab t-shirt with the new store he just opened called Primitive. I am blessed to have Paul and all the rest of my favourite skaters riding for the company.

In fact, you’ve got a huge all star team, practically every major innovator (Bob Burnquist, PJ Ladd, Eric Koston, Mike Caroll, Justin Eldridge, Jereme Rogers, Jason Dill, Brandon Biebel, Darrell Stanton, etc etc) in skateboarding for the last 8 years rides for Diamond, how is this?
When I first started Diamond Supply Co. in 1998 I was already heavy in the skate scene since the early 80’s. I spent my entire life since I was 10 years old on a skateboard and just happened to grow up with some of the best skaters in the world at EMB in San Francisco. Just from being friends with different skaters around the world I end up meeting everyone that is friends with them, if they rip and are cool with other people on the team they usually just end up bein down to ride for us. Like I said before, we are very blessed when it comes to the love we get from the skate community.

You’ve contributed a lot to "skate fashion" and SB Dunks would not stand where they do today (with skaters) if it were not for your collaboration on the Tiffany dunk in the managers series, do you think this is true?
I think that Nike SB has a dope skate program and pretty much all of their skaters are also on the Diamond Team. I don’t think the Diamond Dunk really made a difference in the skate world. Skaters have been rockin’ and skating in Nikes before SB’s even came out, Nike skate shoes would have been a hit regardless if we made the Diamond Tiffany dunk or not.

Diamond Supply has been worn by many famous rap artists, is this on purpose? How does Diamond Supply find it’s way to rappers, organically? or through friends? or product placement?
A lot of rappers come to our store and shop since we are on Fairfax in LA. Others just pick it up somewhere probably because it says Diamond on it. There has been some real surprises tho, such as Lil Wayne wearing a Diamond t-shirt on the cover of Rides Magazine and Rick Ross coming into our store claiming he has almost every Diamond t-shirt already. Things like bug me out and I have no idea how they know about a skate brand?

I do however hook up a lot of artists because over the years we have become homies with them and they show us lots of love in videos and magazines like Strong Arm Steady, Evidence, Alchemist, Self Scientific, DJ Muggs, Cool Kids, Pac Div, Currency, San Quinn, Bun B, Kaz Kizah and some other cats. The Game gets Diamond stuff from us sometimes and I am cool with Ice T and his kid Lil Ice so they come by the shop to get Diamond stuff as well.

What brands are you feeling?
I like Levis 501 jeans and whatever t-shirts friends from other companies give me. I like Crooks & Castles, Mighty Healthy, Blackscale, Huf, Supreme and FourStar but mainly wear Polo outerwear, Army Surplus jackets or my own stuff. Kicks are usually basic white or black Chucks, Vans and Jordan’s. I skate in Lakai Carroll Selects and DVS J Dubbs.

What collabo’s can we expect in the near future? What drops can we expect from Diamond in the next few months?
It never ends with drops, its the nature of the business…. gotta keep it movin’. The bigger we get the more I have to crank out and the crazy thing is I am our only designer. I have designed over 80 tee shirts just this year and I have this carpal tunnel messing up my hand and wrist. Expect to see a cut n sew line from us in ‘09 amongst many other things.

As for Collabs I have slowed down on them and you will only see 1 collab out of our 16 holiday t-shirts. We are however doing 3 new shoes with DVS, a travel bag with Gravis/In4mation, A shirt collab with our friends from APB in Hawaii.

Skurban or is it Emo Hip Hop?

We keep an eye on fashion here and what’s happening in the world and it’s also interesting to see what the media comes up with, with it’s compulsion to categorise, pigeonhole and compartmentalise everything around them.

With the above in mind the crude and come up with ”emo hip hop” that’s hip hop heads in tight jeans for us in the know but there’s a new word on the block for those not content with emo hip hop or mash the word is a combination of skate and urban and so we have “Skurban”. The genius that came up with this obviously had to justify this new word and here come the explanation. The new fashion of Skurban was popularised by hip hop superstars such as Lupe Fiasco and Pharrell Williams or were both ex-skaters and have both dabbled with fashion. Pharrell must be know for his connection with Bape and later founding Ice Cream and BBC (not the TV channel).

So what typifies Skurban well as far as we can see it’s pretty much just the development of clothing but lets humour them, so it’s now all about tighter fitting clothing ie jeans not so baggy and tops hat fit instead of XXXL the other really important thing is colourful prints and we’d like to add all over prints.

So that all said at The urban Shop we have noticed jeans getting tighter for about 4 season that 2 years but they still aint tight unless you go for that killer emo look and we don’t really have any of them our jeans have now gone from phat or relaxed to trim fit and there as been a definite move form XL to people buying their size with emo a size smaller. A design feature that we have been rocking for a while though has to be all over and colourful prints and you will see more coming in for spring/summer.


Brands to try if your looking for that Skurban look jeans, Mada, Insight, Atticus and RVCA (arriving any day) tops Schwipe, Insight and King Apparel

Here'sa n interview with Pharrel for CBS news it was working at time of publishing Ice Cream Skate Interview