I’ve always been drawn to characters. The ones who seem to stand outside the frame, who challenge what’s expected and exist in that volatile space between brilliance and self-destruction. Over time, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just their stories I’m drawn to. It’s the freedom they pursue and, in some cases, achieve. And few figures embody that kind of freedom more completely than Bunker Spreckels.
Bunker wasn’t just a surfer, or a socialite, or an heir to an American fortune. He was all of those things, and none of them. He was a living contradiction: born into a legacy, yet hellbent on obliterating its boundaries. Heir to the Spreckels sugar empire and stepson to Clark Gable, Bunker could’ve had a life of comfort, access, and luxury. Instead, he chose something wildly different. He chose a path of chaos and creativity. He burned bright and fast, and became a myth, a legend.
When I first began thinking about designing this collection, it wasn’t just about style or surf or the 1970s. It was about what Bunker represented. He became a kind of symbol for me—a muse, but also a mirror. Because to truly understand him, you have to wrestle with your own relationship to freedom, to rebellion, and to the roles we’re all expected to play.
I’ve always been drawn to characters. The ones who seem to stand outside the frame, who challenge what’s expected and exist in that volatile space between brilliance and self-destruction. Over time, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just their stories I’m drawn to. It’s the freedom they pursue and, in some cases, achieve. And few figures embody that kind of freedom more completely than Bunker Spreckels.
Bunker wasn’t just a surfer, or a socialite, or an heir to an American fortune. He was all of those things, and none of them. He was a living contradiction: born into a legacy, yet hellbent on obliterating its boundaries. Heir to the Spreckels sugar empire and stepson to Clark Gable, Bunker could’ve had a life of comfort, access, and luxury. Instead, he chose something wildly different. He chose a path of chaos and creativity. He burned bright and fast, and became a myth, a legend.
When I first began thinking about designing this collection, it wasn’t just about style or surf or the 1970s. It was about what Bunker represented. He became a kind of symbol for me—a muse, but also a mirror. Because to truly understand him, you have to wrestle with your own relationship to freedom, to rebellion, and to the roles we’re all expected to play.
The Myth Beyond the Man
Bunker always fascinated me. He wasn’t merely a person, he was a phenomenon. Over time, he transcended biography to become a mythic figure, his story tangled in whispers and legend. Forty years on, people are still trying to distinguish the facts from the fable. But maybe that’s the point. The real Bunker is unknowable, and perhaps intentionally so. What is unmistakable, though, is the radiant, uncontainable energy he embodied. He was a light that refused to be shaped by conventional expectations, whether from his blue-blood lineage or from the cultural confines of surfing.
A Beautiful Contradiction
Some say he was a constructed persona, a fabrication. But I don’t buy that. I believe he had something he needed to express, and his life became the canvas. That energy—chaotic, inconsistent, and yet oddly cohesive—tells a story that defies logic but feels intuitively true. He was gifted with a powerful lineage, a legacy of achievement. Yet he broke from it, not to just simply reject it, but to reconfigure it into something raw and real. His wildness was about reinvention.
Freedom Has a Price
Bunker’s life was a volatile fusion of conflicting worlds—heritage and hedonism, structure and spontaneity. And what emerged was a character too ahead of his time, too complex for simple definitions. He became the embodiment of pure freedom, the kind society instinctively fears and suppresses. When someone dares to live unfiltered, untamed, unbound by norms, the world pushes back. Bunker experienced that backlash from every angle: family, friends, his own community. Because no one is “allowed” to live with that much freedom.
But that’s what makes him so vital. That’s why he remains such a high inspiration for me.
A Gentle Soul, a Wild Path
Amidst the madness and myth, those who knew him speak often of his gentleness. His vulnerability. His creativity. These weren’t necessarily contradictions. His intensity came from a deep sensitivity, making his story as tragic as it is transcendent. In trying to expand his world beyond the narrow expectations laid before him, he paid the price. He was too talented, too beautiful, too creative—just too much for the world around him.
Not Just a Story of the ’70s
Bunker’s narrative is deeply tied to the 1970s, an era with its own rules, its own responses to rebellion. He was mentoring California culture before it knew what it was. He helped invent the energy of Venice Beach, that collision of art, athleticism, madness, and style that came to define the ‘West Coast.’ And today, as culture searches once again for authenticity, for radical self-expression, his story feels more relevant than ever.
WRITTEN BY Jérôme Mage
#CINEMA