New York City is filled with signs: interrogative messages, typically in block letters or neon squiggles, staring from shop windows, and words of spray-painted affirmation leering from brick walls. I’m sure that in a particularly vulnerable state, these signs could begin to talk to you. A model in #mycalvins is poised to whisper advice into your ear. It was in one such open and perilous state on the Saturday after my very first week of college in the big city that I found, stuck to my shoe, a mysterious pull-tab poster. The wayward flier featured an oversized barcode covered by a large, red X along with a phone number repeated on pinky-sized tabs pre-cut along the paper’s bottom. I ripped a tab off and went around the corner to call the number. The robot lady on the other line raced through her script (she pronounced “Canal” to rhyme with “anal”), but the details were clear: Alexander Wang (woof) fashion event, Canal street among three other locations across the city, tomorrow, be early.

The next day, a few of the fashion-y girls from my dorm floor to whom I’d spread the news joined me on the brisk walk downtown to see what all the hype was about. As we approached a tragic-looking line looped around C-anal, Howard, and a significant portion of Mercer, we decided to preserve our dignity and dip. But I ran into a mutual from freshman orientation—her name also started with M, she was in school for painting, and she had those two strands of face-framing hair dyed white two years before it was cool—who said that if we left now, we could make it to the second location and be at the front of the line. My floormates bailed but I was determined, so I took the R train with M all the way to 59th and Lex and booked it to the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue where a giant Alexander Wang-branded box truck promised us we’d soon receive designer grails. Hypebeasts of all races, ages, and backgrounds dotted the Upper East Side’s unevenly paved sidewalks, facing entire blunts and blasting Ye (don’t deadname him!) although it was only 11 am. They all carried trash bags, which I deduced were the shopping bags for today’s display of guerrilla commerce. Wow, I thought. Wang must be sample sale-ing some seriously covetable stuff if it needed to be concealed as refuse. But when it was M’s and my turn to step in the truck and shop, I was disappointed to see only three items from the designer’s next Adidas streetwear collab for sale: a tacky black-suede creeper-like shoe with half-white-half-gum sole, and black hoodies and t-shirts featuring a graphic of an NDA contract crossed out by the same red X I’d seen on the magical flier that lured me here to begin with.

The queue I was holding up was growing cacophonous and I was growing anxious. Eager to buy my first piece of Alexander Wang (2016 was a very important year for him), I paid $150 for the hoodie and hopped out to meet M around the corner. She got the hoodie too, and the shoes.

 

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But soon after descending from the box truck and back to the street, the buyer’s high that sustained me through this hours-long shopping mission began to dissipate. Holding my trash bag filled with ostensibly luxurious clothes, a gut-swirling depression overtook me, worsening with each step. In the suburbs, the fashion world I’d imagined was an opulent fever dream adorned with, like, ostrich feather boas and diamonds and perfectly tailored organza dresses. Here I was, listening to a shoe that had just dropped—metaphorically, and now, in my anguish, literally—swish around in a crinkling plastic sack. Having traded my own very limited cash for cheaply made Adidas, fashion registered to me like before-it-was-legal weed on 5th Avenue, lean sipped at kickback-like fashion functions with six-figure budgets, and models makeupless in basketball jerseys and cheap strappy heels posing alongside thinfluencers with massive slices of oily pizza at Short Stories. But the overall gonzo shopping experience was not unique to Wang. The box-truck with limited stock and limited locations was merely the latest instance of an ongoing streetwearification of fashion. It felt like the industry had put on a really ill-fitting costume to try and cater to normal people whose daily outfits consist of jeans and sneakers rather than avant-garde silhouettes and pinchy platforms—and it didn’t make sense to me. But, in actuality, the VFILES of it all, the back-of-the-truck luxury of it all, and the Gucci graffiti of it all was the most “fashion” the industry could get: going where the money is.

I blame Supreme. Well, I blame the attractiveness of Supreme’s hype-based business model that Wang’s marketing team so clearly adopted: hard-to-get drops and unpredictable collaborations with unexpected brands like Adidas. If you zoom out a bit to look at streetwear as an aesthetic form with an alluring business opportunity attached, its prominence during that particular moment of the 2010s feels less like a natural phenomenon and more like a plan. That’s because the plan in fashion is, and always will be, to meet consumers with tactics to encourage shopping and expand their corporate reach. The kids loved Supreme, so Gucci launched Gucci Graffiti, so Givenchy poached Matthew Williams, founding designer of 1017 ALYX 9SM, to be the creative director for both men’s and women’s collections. Not only had Supreme’s drop-based, hype-driven version of exclusivity had caught the eyes of the traditional old guard of inaccessible luxury, but its value to directly connecting with a new market had too: Supreme breached the European luxury market with a Fall/Winter 2017 Men’s Fashion Week collaboration with Louis Vuitton. In 2020, the erstwhile downtown skate brand’s value was sealed to the suits like all good business deals are: with an acquisition. VF Corporation—owners of The North Face, Vans, and Timberland—bought Supreme for $2.1 billion, sealing its fate as the first hypebrand, if you will.

Supreme was founded in 1994 by the British-born businessman and professional chiller James Jebbia. Originally, it wasn’t a clothing label, but a multi-brand retailer selling skate wares on Soho’s Lafayette Street. With its local-skater shop boys, minimal layout optimized for space hop on a board, and TV in the background constantly playing Muhammad Ali fights and films like Taxi Driver, the Supreme store was less of a shopping destination than it was a place to hang. Initially, Supreme perpetuated a hyperlocal myth specific to the downtown arts and culture hub of ’90s Soho: smoke a blunt, have a sesh, drink a 40, chill outside on Lafayette. The first few Supreme-branded garms came soon after the shop picked up a reputation. They included sticker packs for the skaters’ decks and white t-shirt blanks printed with firetruck red rectangles containing the brand name in white Futura Heavy Oblique—henceforth known as the box logo.

During its first year, a young Supreme store chiller named Harmony Korine would help launch the brand into the art world. The story goes that Korine, after meeting Larry Clark in Washington Square Park, wrote the script for the seminal cult film Kids (1995) and cast early Supreme members Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter, who repped their skate team on camera. Once Kids was released, Supreme’s myth bloomed within the downtown arts scene, creating a link between in-the-know artsy Soho chillers and underground skate culture where both informed one another. In March 1995, four months before the theatrical release of Kids, Vogue compared Chanel’s interlocking Cs to Supreme’s box logo. By 1998, Supreme had expanded beyond Lower Manhattan to open three stores in Japan. In 2004, the brand opened a highly anticipated store on LA’s Fairfax Avenue, even launching a Hebrew box logo to pay homage to the area’s primarily Jewish dwellers. The 21st century saw Supreme present a business model as unique as its consumer base: weekly drops of bread-and-butter products like box-logo hats, hoodies, and tees, alongside limited-edition artist collaborations with everyone from late performance artist Pope.L and skate legend The Gonz to blue-chip favorites Damien Hirst and George Condo to Kermit the Frog. By the 2010s, luxury labels wanted in on the hypemodel, and so in 2016 you had the freshly Gucci-graffitied streets of Soho.

Jebbia never intended to launch Supreme as a luxury-adjacent streetwear brand, but it was so effective that it did. “James tapped into a secret sauce,” said Korine in a 2017 interview with Vogue about the cult status of Supreme. Said sauce is an amalgam of the brand’s drop-driven business model as well as its narrative of authenticity. Supreme is, historically, by and for skaters, a lifestyle that is as coveted as its products.

However, its audience—so valuable as to fetch billions—clearly extends beyond just those who’ve ever shredded the gnar. Its success among ’90s Soho skater locals and luxury consumers alike exemplifies how the fashion industry is able to turn a subculture’s lifestyle into an “exclusive” product for the label-conscious masses.

“Through myth markets, brands are able to form personalities that mimic identity formation.”

In Shoptimism, Lee Eisenberg cites identity formation, or the multi-step process humans undertake to develop a distinct sense of self, as a key factor in how brands like Supreme have been able to overtake the market and reach the little-understood and forever-coveted “cult status.” “Brands, when they’re working right, aren’t mere love vessels, they’re ‘valuable resources for identity construction,’” he writes, citing American social scientist Douglas B. Holt, an expert in cultural branding and strategy. Not only are brands mouthpieces for taste, according to Eisenberg, the most successful ones serve as a bridge between what feels like a completely individual sense of aesthetic expression and the broader culture. Using the two-party system of Buyers and Sellers he dubs the Buy/Sell binary: Essentially, these brands get you to buy into something that, from the Buy side, feels personally connected to you in a way that no one could understand, though from the Sell side, you’ve been siloed into another mass consumer group. These consumer groups relate to Holt’s concept of myth markets, a term he described in a 2003 edition of Harvard Business Review as “an implicit national conversation in which a wide variety of cultural products compete to provide the most compelling myth.” Eisenberg describes the evolving myth of Mountain Dew, a cultural product that represented hillbilly and redneck markets from the ’50s through the ’80s, until the ’90s birthed a much more specific “slacker” myth market, “wherein one finds surfboarders, skateboarders, X-gamers, Xbox gamers, fans of Beavis and Butt-head and all things Jackass,” he writes.

Myth markets are to products as starter packs are to people. Profitability-by-association has become the modern method for marketing because it reflects the modern human instinct to define one another by what we buy. A starterpack example: The Hydroflask is both VSCO girl and clean girl; wraparound shades are bratcore and blokette. We may be complex human beings, but our tastes are not individual. Supreme’s myth market features brands like Stüssy and Fucking Awesome, but its starterpack includes more personalized objects: an Arthur Jafa print (too soon?), a cracked iPhone whose screen fissures are gummed up with old cocaine, a pair of heavily skidmarked Hanes tighty whities. You’d think that grouping a product along with its competitors is antithetical to the purpose of helping it stand out in a marketplace, but through myth markets, brands are able to form personalities that mimic identity formation. All together, these brand associations establish a multifaceted narrative of a consumer’s sense of self based on what they buy. Are you a waterbottle-toting heathnut with a six-pack? A fun-loving partier wearing sunglasses in the club at 3 am? A dedicated and pleasantly stoned skater who spends time landing tricks rather than taking showers? You can communicate that all by which brand you purchase, the companies want you to believe. And to a certain extent, the brands are us, per the starter pack.

Where ’90s Supreme had its band of downtown skaters, post-millenium Supreme had rag-tag rap group Odd Future. The crew—whose ranks feature such talents as Earl Sweatshirt, and Frank Ocean, and head honcho Tyler, the Creator—were likewise born out of a Supreme store, this time on Fairfax Avenue in LA. In a GQ interview from 2012 between Tyler and Glenn O’Brien, Tyler cited the Fairfax shop as the only place he and his friends could buy skate gear in the early days. They fit right in with the cool kids who worked at Supreme. However, this particular group of youth-on-wheels in 2009 added an irreverent permutation to the defiant “fuck you!” attitude characteristic to mid-’90s skaters: a bit of humor, several rape jokes, and, in the de facto leader’s case, the F-slur approximately 37 times in his first solo album, Bastard. According to Tyler in that same GQ interview, some of his early shoutouts to Supreme in his lyrics earned Odd Future freebies as well as a running relationship with Jebbia and the Supreme team. After shock value launched the group into mainstream conversation (Tyler famously ate a cockroach in the music video for his his breakout single “Yonkers,” which went viral), the group got a skit television show called Loiter Squad on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, and even launched a streetwear clothing brand of their own called Golf Wang, famously featured in a photo shoot with XXL Magazine that doubled as a music video shoot for their group anthem “Oldie.” In the song’s final verse, Tyler rapped “I was 15 when I first drew that donut, five years later for our label yeah we own it.” And own it they did, Golf Wang was headquartered on Fairfax Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Supreme store that showed them early support.

“Supreme’s marketing became such a hot commodity because first and foremost, the brand is by and for skaters who are always down for the hang—that money shit really only happened because fashion decided to pimp out authenticity as a myth market.”

Though the store on Fairfax was only around for three years and Odd Future slowly became a series of incredibly successful solo acts (they’ve still never officially broken up), the rap group exists on a cult level much like Supreme. Whether they knew it or not, Odd Future’s road to success mirrors that of Supreme in the ’90s: hang out at a store, develop a following from like minded people in your area, earn cult status from a big break. The best part of the Odd Future story, in a meta way, is continuing their relationship with Supreme while replicating the same hypemodel. Their brand had a pink frosted donut logo like Supreme had the box logo, offered limited access to exclusive products, and sold out in seconds due to dedicated fans. As a product of Supreme, Odd Future aka Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (or OFWGKTA, OFWGKTADGAFLLBBLSBFBN if you’re a head, OFWGKTADGAFLLBBLSBFBNYKWTFWATCESFEHBJDSTKT if you were fucking there) was an example of how organic hype can breed more organic hype: from the kids skating in ’90s Soho who wore a box logo in Larry Clark’s arthouse film to the kids in 2009 skating at Fairfax Park, loitering outside the Supreme store, plotting their next 8-bar.

As Soho skaters brought Supreme to the art world who brought it to LA’s self-proclaimed wolf gang, Odd Future itself would popularize Supreme through their own appeal from beyond its initial indie cult following into the mainstream. Luxury houses saw the dollar signs in underdog-to-indie-hero stories like Supreme and Odd Future and decided to hire creatives with lore of their own. Trevor Andrew was a marginally talked-about talented graffiti artist before his GucciGhost persona—a last-minute Halloween costume made from a Gucci logo-printed bedsheet and a pair of scissors—caught the attention of the Italian luxury brand’s then-creative director Alessandro Michele who hired him to produce a capsule collection in January 2015. In 2020 a partnership between Andrew and digital online art platform Nifty Gateway, he sold 385 original GucciGhost NFTs in 12 seconds, each piece priced between $250 and $5,100. Five years later, in June of 2020, Givenchy hired 1017 ALYX 9SM streetwear legend Matthew Williams, who expanded upon his iconic rollercoaster-harness-inspired belt buckle from his high-end streetwear brand to create a series of lock-carabiner-looking hardware for the storied label. These chunky mixed-metal adornments would later find themselves affixed on boots and Givenchy staple bags like the Antigona. (At the end of 2023, it was announced that Williams would be leaving the French luxury brand to focus on “the next chapter” of ALYX and his family.) To come full circle: just as Supreme did in 2017, Tyler Okonma (Tyler, the Creator’s government name, apparently, reserved for such luxury purposes) designed a collection with Louis Vuitton earlier this year featuring colorful takes on the classic Keepall Bandoulière 50 duffle and a pale green Damier-patterned golf bag, a tongue in cheek luxury homage to his Golf Wang days.

By the end of the 2010s, Supreme’s myth market had added to its starter pack exclusive luxury products including graffitied Gucci, hardware-inspired Givenchy, and even a box logo-branded Louis Vuitton hoodie—the spoils of hype. The underground legends like Korine and Odd Future were crucial to focusing the mainstream gaze onto Supreme. But that authentic feeling still remained. Supreme’s narrative of authenticity only got more powerful as luxury brands repurposed it and its methods. Supreme’s marketing became such a hot commodity because first and foremost, the brand is by and for skaters who are always down for the hang—that money shit really only happened because fashion decided to pimp out authenticity as a myth market. Supreme didn’t have to become a sellout to sell out. That’s the hype business: as long as a narrative undergirds “limited edition,” money can be made on the aspiration by those who will pay to have a garment that says they were there.

“At this stage in streetwear’s relationship with luxury, a product like a box logo t-shirt isn’t so much of a cultural phenomenon as it is a symbol for what the industry has decided to value for the moment.”

However, the hypemodel has a quick lifespan in luxury. Two weeks ago, it was announced that VF, the parent company that bought Supreme in 2020 on the heels of its mainstream market success and luxury stint, would be selling the brand to EssilorLuxottica for just $1.5 billion, to close by the end of 2024’s fiscal year. As VF CEO Bracken Darren said in a statement reported in Forbes, “Given the brand’s distinct business model and VF’s integrated model, our strategic portfolio review concluded there are limited synergies between Supreme and VF, making a sale a natural next step.” That “distinct business model” is the weekly drops and limited collaborations that made Supreme coveted by skaters, luxury consumers, and conglomerates alike. The model turned out to be so exclusive, that even corporate execs couldn’t acquire it as a strategy. Supreme can be bought and sold by the cultural interlopers in finance who seek to cash in on the hype, but Supreme will always do what it did in ’94: give an aesthetic voice to the skaters and artmakers who never compromise. What does the business future hold for OGs like Supreme? Few know, but allegedly Mark Zuckerberg is in talks to become a part-owner.

If brands can form identities like we humans do, then products are the language through which they communicate. At this stage in streetwear’s relationship with luxury, a product like a box logo t-shirt isn’t so much of a cultural phenomenon as it is a symbol for what the industry has decided to value for the moment. Luxury brands might be able to replicate the “you had to be there” feeling by biting the hypemodel, but they can’t manufacture the kind of cult appeal that can only come from actually being there: on Lafayette before Soho became a mall, on Fairfax right as it became cool. Facing a blunt on 57th and 5th Avenue for a Wang drop just isn’t the same.