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I visited San Francisco for a week last January, and my favorite day of the trip was also my most unexpected. My cousin drove me to Outer Sunset, a chilly surf town on the west coast of the city with rows of pink and yellow homes that reminded me of those I’d walked past, barefoot, along the Jersey Shore since I was small. My only previous knowledge of the neigborhood came from Pulitzer winner Andrew Sean Greer, who canonized it in his novel The Story of a Marriage:
“They called it the Sunset. [It was] a part of the city no one really built on until the war was over. Then hills were flattened; soil was laid down over the sand; and they built a grid of streets and low pastel houses with garages and Spanish roofs and picture windows that flashed with the appearance of the sun, all in rows for fifty avenues until you reached the ocean … It was nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or Bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph.”
Greer’s SF was set in the ’50s, but there are plenty of reasons to take a photo in Outer Sunset these days. The day I visited, we hit a coffee roaster, had a beer in a new taproom and bought prints at an art studio. The crown jewel of the visit, though, was Mollusk Surf Shop, a corner hangout and beloved local institution that has helped build the burgeoning brand’s reputation while honoring its off-grid roots and laidback, surf-town feel.
Mollusk opened in 2005, as a shop for the craftspeople and surfers of Northern California. It stocked alternative boards cut by underground shapers: think flatter, longer and wider. It hosted filmmakers, artists and musicians. It became a hangout, and Mollusk eventually opened stores in other California towns with similar histories and philosophies: Silver Lake and Venice Beach.
And all the while, Mollusk has made some serious surf apparel. You might not be able to log an OOO to visit the shop and tube-chase in the Sunset. But you can stock up on the shop’s apparel online. Mollusk just dropped an array of styles on Huckberry, from chino sweatpants (joggers you can actually wear out to dinner) to camp shirts and corduroy shorts. I bought a T-shirt before leaving the shop that day in January and have worn it an offensive number of times in the months since.
See our five favorites from the drop below, and put the shop on your list next time you’re in the Bay Area. You won’t regret it.
Jeffrey Pants
Mollusk Shop Crew
Summer Shirt
Summer Shorts
Corduroy Short
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