Is Reef… Back?

Well. This is clever. And unnervingly difficult to write about.

History has a way of camouflaging itself while it’s happening. Only years later does the shape of an era sharpen into something legible, and oftentimes, uncomfortable.

It’s not too far-fetched to assume that, in the not-so-distant future, many will stand on melted pavement and picture themselves as the renegades who would’ve sounded the alarm on the climate collapse. Most people imagine they’d have been the ones to act during history’s awkward stumbles, or, at the very least, called out the early-2000s heyday of selling sandals by marketing women’s bodies.

The great moral test of any time always seems to be the one ignored in real time.

Surfing’s gender imbalance in the early millennium wasn’t the apocalypse, but it wasn’t subtle either. It was on billboards, in major ad campaigns, and very much etched into the culture. Reef’s iconic “Reef Girls” were a high-gloss embodiment of an era obsessed with strategically zooming in on women’s glutes. We covered this in How Surfers Get Paid, in The Sexualisation of Women’s Surfing episode.

Peak surf capitalism. And, presumably, the peak era for Reef — at least to every teenage boy who lingered a little too long in the sandal aisle.

Which brings us, cheerfully, to the question: can you look back on a past era, arguably the brand’s most memorable, and tastefully mock it, while also using it to sell the same product?

And more to the point: what does it mean to reintroduce a cultural symbol that once stood for imbalance? Can marketing evolve without fully letting go of what made it work the first time?

Apparently, yes. To all of the above.

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Above, Rose Machado plays the role of the modern, reconsidered Reef Girl. Yes, she’s still selling bikinis and sandals. Yes, she’s still gallivanting through beautiful places. But this time, she’s entirely in charge of the gaze.

We see her thumbing through a carousel of shirtless men, seemingly kept on a string. The suckers? Griff Colapinto, Shion Crawford, and Noah Beschen.

Only later do we learn she’s actually choosing footwear, not men. It’s a tongue-in-cheek bait-and-switch, delivered with a wink.

“Holy fuck reef is back,” commented @saltybeards, aka Chris Papaleo, on Reef’s new ad reveal. Chris of course filmed a former Reef team rider, Nick Rosza, through the early-to-mid 2000s.

Far be it from us to say whether Reef is “back” — nor whether they went anywhere in the first place — but we have to applaud the evolution.