Kate Bosworth Revisits ‘Blue Crush’ Style With a New Roxy Capsule Collection

May 02, 2023

By Celia Ellenberg

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At the risk of compromising the security questions for all of my internet passwords, my favorite movie is Blue Crush. For a coed who played competitive women's sports throughout high school and often idealized high-profile, heteronormative relationships with ripped-to-shreds professional athletes, the 2002 cult-classic surf flick had everything. The bronzed beach bodies! The sisterhood of badass female athletes—in board shorts! The NFL Pro Bowl! I saw it in the theater on summer break from my sophomore year of college at the nudging of my best friend, who knew I had grown tired of the art-house indies he often dragged me to. "You’ll like this one," he promised. I did.

Short of spending my summers on the Jersey Shore, which has a few breaks up and down its southern coast, I didn't have much adjacency to surf culture growing up. But neither did Kate Bosworth, who famously dyed her hair sun-bleached blonde and started paddling out every day to convince director John Stockwell and producer Brian Grazer that she had the gumption—and the traps and delts—to play Annemarie Chadwick, a native of Oahu's North Shore training to compete in Hawaii's Pipe Masters, a surfing competition where "you don't just get worked—you die." (I know pretty much every word of Lizzy Weiss's script, which was adapted from the 1998 Susan Orlean Outside Magazine article about Maui's surfer girls).

Kate Bosworth in the Roxy collection

"I had never touched a surfboard before I auditioned for that movie," Bosworth confirms on a recent Zoom call. "But there was a really deep affinity with the character as she and I were going through a lot of the same things," Bosworth says, detailing the pressures she felt as an 18-year-old trying to prove herself to the world. "I completely became someone else," she says of the acting required to convincingly play a surfer who could take on not just the men in the lineup ("Don't drop in on me again!") but also best some of the top female athletes competing at the time, trailblazers in the sport like Lisa Andersen—as well as Kate Skarratt and Keala Kennelly, who had cameos in the movie.

Bosworth's dedication to surf life extended to her onscreen wardrobe, which was deliberately distressed by costume designer Susan Matheson, and has landed her—and costars Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake— on summer mood boards in perpetuity. "I came to set on the North Shore with a suitcase, and I barely opened it," confirms Bosworth. "I was living in Annemarie's clothes—her board shorts, mismatched bikinis, and whatever was on the floor in the morning when I woke up." With noughties nostalgia running high and the cult-classic film celebrating its 20th anniversary, Bosworth has partnered with Roxy on a new capsule collection that taps into the film's enduring appeal, bucket hats and all.

By Christian Allaire

By Alexandra Macon

By Tish Weinstock

"I’ve been knocking on their door for years. I’m only half joking!" Bosworth says of her collaboration with the women's surf brand that is credited for designing the first women's board shorts in 1990. She adds that her personal circumstances partly accounted for her recent, somewhat emotional return to the role that made her famous. "The idea was in the zeitgeist with the movie's 20th anniversary, but I also turned 40 last year, so there was this milestone. My character in the movie struggles with self-doubt and vulnerability and fear, and I felt like I had come full circle with all of those things and was finally able to find this centered alignment in myself," she says.

Bosworth and Roxy's global creative and design director Steph Micci's team exchanged mood-board images and references—everything from archival Roxy campaigns, and Delia's catalogs, to Vogue images and old covers of The Face and i-D magazines—to strike a balance between hypermasculine and hyperfeminine clothes that "make you feel good and confident but don't prevent you from doing anything," says Micci. Bosworth's mix-and-match pieces feature the brand's familiar hibiscus prints rendered in shades of bright melon, a citrine-lime green, and a lavender color she describes as "youthful and fresh but elevated and also sporty."

By Christian Allaire

By Alexandra Macon

By Tish Weinstock

Standouts include a versatile striped one-piece maillot that she says can live anywhere, "from Oahu to the Hamptons," and a pair of excellent lightweight cargo pants as well as a few oversized, supersoft sweatshirts that pair well with bikini bottoms and flip-flops. "That's the very North Shore way," Bosworth confirms.

It's also how girls want to dress right now—those who actually surf or just aspire to. "There's this one dress in the collection with a square neck that's a little body-con—it's so cute," says Izzi Gomez, one of the Roxy pro surfers who costars with Bosworth in the collection's campaign, which was shot in Oahu. "We’re always nostalgic for things that happened 20 years prior," Matheson adds of why Blue Crush style is coming back around. "In 2000 I was obsessed with late-’70s, early-’80s fashion."

This affinity might account for one of my personal favorite fashion moments in the film: Annemarie's low-rise jeans with the lace-up front that she pulls on over her bikini after breaking her board and rebuffing Matthew Davis's initial request for surf lessons. "Henry Duarte on Sunset Blvd became famous for making lace-up rock-and-roll pants for Lenny Kravitz and Axl Rose. I couldn't afford them from Henry," says Matheson, "but I was at the Hippie Jeans factory in downtown LA and discovered that they were going to make jeans with a lace-up front for women that September 2002, so as soon as they produced them, I had them ship them to me in Hawaii."

Matheson's other ripped-from-the-design-floor score? The black spring 2002 Armani plunging racerback dress that Bosworth wore to the football players’ luau before submerging herself in the ocean and delivering one of the film's defining lines: "I want a girl to be on the cover of Surf Magazine, and that would be great if that girl were me, but any girl would do." There's a ribbed lilac racerback crop top in her new collection that is no less aspirational.

The Kate Bosworth x Roxy collection is available now at roxy.com. Shop key pieces from the collection, below.