Wetsuits are so incredibly cool. Tough, even. Not so much the thin, brittle wetsuit tops you might wear above trunks to fend off a lukewarm tropical breeze, but the five- or six-millimeter-thick, hooded suits of neoprene armor that allow surfers to chase waves along the frozen shores of winter New England, the drizzly cold Pacific Northwest, the Aleutian arc, or even closer to the poles — Iceland, Alaska, Antarctica.
Although, what might be even cooler, or at least tougher, is soaking a wool sweater in oil and then duct-taping it to your body as a means of fending off the cold water of San Francisco for at least twenty or thirty minutes of surf time, before retreating to a roaring fire on the beach and maybe a warming slug from a passed-around whiskey bottle. Which is what surfers did before the wetsuit.
Jack O’Neill bridged that gap. Nobody really seems to agree on who exactly invented the surfing wetsuit, but it was O’Neill’s bearded, eyepatch-wearing face
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