‘We are a community of fashion enthusiasts who are inspired by clothing styles derived by skateboard, surf, hiphop, and retro 80s/90s sensibilities. Streetwear continues to evolve in modernity, but tends to be distinguishable as an urban style to the general public.
/r/streetwear
Subscribers here are welcome to show off their latest outfits, latest pickups and engage others in discussion about fashion expression.’
/r/streetwear
contents
4
Jeremy K
14
An Introduction to Techwear
20
Koven Wei
26
Streetwear 101: Stussy
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K.S
32
A.N
40
Kanye West & Adidas & Yeezy
42
Noah
52
Supreme FW16, London
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Why Are So Many People So Obsessed With Supreme?
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Benji van Geene
78
Hunter Dennis
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Interview w/ Moderator - /u/MrRikka
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Credits
“Grailed defines techwear as ‘clothing for everyday life with special fabric, construction and properties that allow for breathability, movement, water-resistance and comfort’. I used to dress as traditional Americana. Nothing too crazy, but everytime I wore the clothing, I felt like I was dressing up as someone not me. Then one day, I saw someone dressed in techwear. Part futuristic, part ninja. As if they were an evil henchman from a cyberpunk movie. I fell in love with it immediately and wanted to pursue the look more. I’ve come to learn that there’s more to techwear than the typical ‘techninja’ fit. And while I still usually dress as a ‘techninja’, I’ve come to respect the other intricacies of techwear. Techwear is unique in that it mostly exists in an online vacuum, which makes you question the legitimacy of the actual aesthetic, but through various communities I’ve found a lot of support customising my own clothing and finding more obscure pieces that work in a ‘techwear’ fit.” 4
/u/thejeka
JEREMY K.
@jdotkdot
JEREMY K. “A fairly 'accepted' techwear silhouette/aesthetic. I actually like this as I wear a variation of this to work fairly often.
Nike Fleece (Custom) Uniqlo Shirt Guerilla Group Tank top Nike ACG Cargos Nike Sock dart (Custom)
Overall the ACG collaboration with Errolson Hugh is insane. These pants are water and wind resistant, and have great style. Unfortunately they fade a bit due to the material, but for $200 these are amazing pants. Great cut, great construction, and great price. The sock darts I only purchased because of eske (@es._.ke) - He was the one who originally did this modification to the sock darts, and I loved it. He's done a lot of great stuff. I hate the cheap construction of the Nike Sock darts but they're probably my favourite pair of shoes that I own at the moment.�
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/u/thejeka @jdotkdot
Cav Empt Plague Hoodie Cargo Shorts (Custom) Vans Slip Ons
“Bit of Techwear, heavily influenced by Japanese design. I love Japanese streetwear and fashion, and draw inspiration from a lot of Japanese design and try to incorporate it more into my outfits and day to day life. Cav Empt is a really cool Japanese streetwear brand, they have some really iconic designs and distinctive patterns.�
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Uniqlo Shirt Guerilla Group Tank top Cargo Shorts (Custom) Nike & Acronym Prestos
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/u/thejeka @jdotkdot
“This is a very ‘overdone’ Techwear aesthetic, but I liked this outfit. I originally purchased a sewing machine so I could customise my pants and avoid having to pay the absurd prices, and wanted to make a cool looking 3/4 styled pants. Also the Acronym Prestos were a grail of mine for the longest time.
of their pants some day. They occasionally have pleated pants which is super cool, and not done enough in techwear in my opinion.”
Uniqlo has amazing basics. The Airism shirt I received for free from a Uniqlo promo, then I went out and bought two more. Super lightweight, sweat wicking, and can be worn as a standalone piece. I love Guerilla Group as well - Taiwanese based techwear brand, they have amazing cuts of clothing. The tank top is pretty much a staple in a lot of techwear outfits, and I want to own some
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grail /ɡreɪl/
· a thing which is eagerly pursued or sought after.
“I used to only take fit pics in front of a brick wall (like this photo) but after relentless prompting from my girlfriend, I decided to up my game and change backdrops. This is one of my cooler outfits in my opinion. The ‘onu.is’ funnel was the first piece of women’s clothing I owned. I was on the fence about purchasing it for about 3 months, then decided to just go for it. Ultimately I didn’t keep it as it was cut too weird for male proportions, but I want to make something similar to this down the line. Unfortunately, ‘onu.is’s male selection is quite weak compared to the female stuff.
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/u/thejeka
@jdotkdot
13
techwear
Grailed ‘An Introduction to Techwear’ May 25, 2016
techwear The influence of techwear within the greater fashion industry is growing each year. The appeal of forward-thinking clothes that provide both utility and comfort is obvious, but the term techwear and all it entails can be intimidating to understand. A good place to start is to define the term itself. Techwear is clothing for everyday life with special fabric, construction and properties that allow for breathability, movement, waterresistance and comfort. The main appeal of techwear clothing and gear is that it can make life easier, whether it’s being able to carry more stuff on a weekend trip or to stay dry in a downpour. Techwear isn’t easy to jump into headlong, but because of the minimalist, versatile nature of the garments, there is plenty of room for experimentation. One can pick up a pair of pants or a shell to complement an existing wardrobe and slot that piece in seamlessly. However, to capture the full techwear aesthetic, there are a few common elements. Although there are brands 14
and individual pieces with colours and pattern, most people associate darker, more muted shades with the techwear vibe. Since most of the fabrics are highly technical, there is typically a lack of strong branding in the pieces, and most opt for a streamlined, slim look that is both functional and stylish. Taped seams are present and you can find various straps and buckles to help shape garments in different ways. Most guys you’ll see in full techwear tend to look mysterious and brooding, utilizing the faux-masks and hoods found on many garments. However, one can easily complement a darker, gothic-streetwear look with a technical piece of outerwear, or throw a shell on top of a more basic menswear fit. It’s easy to understand the growth in the popularity of techwear due to both the aforementioned versatility and palette.
“TECHWEAR IS A PROGRESSIVE GENRE OF CLOTHING THAT SEEKS TO EVOLVE ITSELF IN AESTHETIC, COMFORT, AND FUNCTION.”
@edg.e
techwear
/u/redtailspeed123 @kovenwei
KOVEN WEI.
“My style is showing the vibrant centre of streetwear and my attention to detail. I enjoy contrasting with my environment and expressing myself through the clothes I wear. The clothes I look for are ones that turn heads as I wear them.�
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/u/redtailspeed123 @kovenwei
Stussy Coach Jacket Bape Converse Nautica Bag
Highsnobiety ‘Fashion History Lessons: Shawn Stussy’ Jan 22, 2016
shawn stussy
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Born in 1954, Shawn grew up immersed in West Coast surf-culture — something that continues to inform his work to this day, although perhaps more in spirit than on an aesthetic level. He picked up his first surfboard at the tender age of 13, and by his later teenage years had garnered a reputation as a skilful shaper of boards. This would serve as the foundation of the Stussy brand, although it would veer wildly away from that in the years that followed. In fact, Stussy’s shift into the clothing world would happen almost by accident.
how much are those T-shirts?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, they’re not for sale.’ ‘But no, I want to buy 24 of those.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, they’re eight bucks.’
“The way it happened was trade shows in 1981, ’82. I’m making surfboards in 1980, I just scribbled Stussy on them,” Stussy told Empire Ave in a 2013 interview. “I didn’t know, I hadn’t been to trade shows. So, I go ‘let’s print some black Hanes T-shirts’ and I printed white Stussy on them, like Alva, you know? I stood there for three days and I sold about 24 boards. But every single person came by saying:
“There was no venture capital, there was no outside funding. It was my money — and I didn’t have a lot of it,” said the former Certified Public Accountant in an interview with Complex. “We all wanted it to be our thing, we didn’t want our brand strategy dictated by investors’ demands, so we just did what we had to do — including working two jobs, until it got to the point where it could support us.”
‘Yeah I’ll take a board or I’ll take two boards, but
Sinatra went into business with Stussy in ’84, but
Even with his modest trade show success, his board shaping abilities were what kept Stussy afloat for the brand’s first decade. His business partner, Frank Sinatra (no, not that one, and no relation either) remembers those early years and the constant grind that laid the foundations for Stussy’s global success that would follow.
streetwear 101: stussy
it wasn’t until the twilight of that decade that the brand began to see a return on his investment. By then, Stussy’s interlocking ‘S’s (in homage to the Chanel logo) and sports caps emblazoned with a bold ‘S’ (the first fashion brand to do so) had caught on in New York, pushing the label’s revenue to $17 million by the end of the decade. This hip-hop-esque sampling from other styles and genres would become Stussy’s stylistic signature over time. It was just effortlessly cool, and it made sense to those who understood the vast array of reference points that went into the brand’s designs. And they were indeed vast: punk, The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren (for whom Shawn provided the artwork for his 1990 album ‘Round the Outside!’), Keith Haring, DJing, skateboarding, Tokyo, London, New York, hiphop — and that’s just a few of them. “Stussy was one of, if not the first, brand to do what they do,” says Steven Vogel, author of the seminal book Streetwear, which was the first real attempt at explaining this clothing subculture in print. “They balance tapping into the past, remaining current and tapping into the vanguard Zeitgeist better than most. At their core, they aren’t pretentious, they make on-point clothes without really succumbing to trends. Additionally, hell, it’s Stussy, they have become to me and certain people of my generation a staple like Levi’s — sure, not as old, but just as valid in my opinion.” The success, paradoxically, also sparked the beginning of the end for Shawn at his eponymous label. He would leave the brand in 1996, citing that he wished to spend more time with his family in Hawaii. More concrete reasons for his departure have never really been given, but most speculation seems to centre on him becoming jaded with the rigors of operating a multi-million dollar company and seeking something more from life.
“It had turned into something that I was never looking for,” he would tell Acclaim Mag some years later. “With that came a lot of responsibility and twenty-hour work days and all the money in the world. But if you don’t have time to go spend it, what good does it do?” There were also creative differences between himself and his Stussy Tribe — a conglomerate of global confidants, taste-makers and creatives who had helped cultivate the brand’s coolcredentials in their respective cities. In that same interview, Stussy cited the likes of A.P.C. and COMMES des GARÇONS as brands he saw as being the future, while others, he claims, didn’t want the brand to evolve stylistically away from its iconic roots. “I can only speculate as to why he left Stussy,” says Steven Vogel, “but why wouldn’t he leave? Isn’t that what the whole point of this rat race is? Get out as soon as you can? Leave work behind, raise a family, spend quality time with those who are most important and just do whatever the hell you want to do without having to worry about paying rent next month?” It would seem like a fair assumption that, for a kid who was raised on an anti-establishment diet, surrounded by beach-dwelling hippies, that entrepreneurial success was not Shawn’s main priority. He did, however, help pioneer the situation we have today, where people can effectively create their own jobs through sheer determination and creativity, instead of having to slave away at a dead-end office job for forty hours a week. Shawn kept a low profile in the decade following his departure from Stussy, presumably enjoying the fruits of his labour as he took up residence in Hawaii, and later Santa Barbara. “After leaving, I was just a dad for ten years raising my kids,” he told Japanese magazine Honeyee in 2009.
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stussy streetwear 101:
In 2008, however, there were murmurings of Shawn making a return to the clothing business. This would eventually materialise two years later, as he launched S/Double (a moniker derived from a nickname his wife had given him). The aesthetic, as you might expect, was more mature, mixing derby shoes with hand-made surf attire. It was a seemingly unlikely combo, but when you added Shawn Stussy into the mix, it all kind of made sense. A letter from Shawn accompanied the launch of the website, promising that it would be “A modest and soulful adventure, akin to setting up your table in a space at the Rose Bowl, or your neighbourhood flea market… In this day and age of big, puffed up corporate launches and parties, I hope this is exactly the opposite.” It would be easy to interpret this as a snipe at his former label, but it seems more likely that is was a true reflection of his mind-state all along. This, after all, was a man who would dedicate a full day to shaping a board in Stussy’s early days, 28
with Bob Marley blaring in the background, or enlist his mother to sew shorts for his brand. It’s not hard to see why he eventually grew uncomfortable with what Stussy had become. To this day, S/Double remains decidedly low-key, much like the man himself. In fact, a recent visit to the website would’ve greeted you with nothing but a simple message: “Taking a break for a minute… Going surfing and building boards through the fall…” It seems some things, in the mind of Shawn Stussy, are more important than money or materialism. Maybe sometimes how we measure success is deeply flawed – that it’s not about the hours you spend in the office or the money in your account. Maybe that’s his real legacy.
@mayonnaise_d
/u/kiwidu
K.S.
K.S.
K.S.
30
.
“I’m never sure what I’m particularly going for, but what I wear is definitely techwear orientated. Lately I’ve been experimenting with layers to mixed success, that’s what I’m into right now. I’m also really into making and altering clothes and a bunch of the pieces in these pictures are by me. My favourite brands are probably Cav Empt and ACG, although I only own one piece of the former. The unique cuts and shapes you get from both brands are really what draws me in.”
/u/PhoDeNguyen @phodenguyen
The Hu Race Adidas x Pharrell Williams Coach Jacket Adidas Leggings Adidas Tubular PrimeKnits
A.N 32
“fashion breaks my heart.”
KANYE WEST, ADIDAS & YEEZY ‘now we hottest in the streets, it ain’t no discussion’
Kanye West, primarily a producer and hip-hop artist, has been increasingly more involved in the fashion industry with great success over the past few years. After parting ways with Nike due to disagreements on the release of his 'Red Octobers' and Nike refusing to give West royalties from any of the sales, Kanye West decided to leave Nike. From here, West moved to Adidas, where he had more freedom and control over the clothes he was designing and how they would be sold. After YEEZY Season 1, Adidas then distanced themselves from Kanye West's clothing line and announced that they would only be producing the footwear. This includes the incredibly popular
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Yeezy Boost 350. The Yeezy Boost 350 has currently been released in thirteen different colourways (including Boost 350 v2) and has sold out on the day of release every single time. The popularity of this shoe doesn't show any signs of slowing down; although people may claim they are 'washed up' or are generally ubiquitous now, there is no doubt from the sales of the shoe that they are still in extremely high demand. Most shops now offer raffles in order to just get the chance to buy a pair of the shoes, as the influx of internet traffic often crashed store websites. West has said that he will hopefully remain in the fashion world for a long time, constantly trying to push boundaries and norms.
FACTS
/u/ImDeluxx @noahlikesclothes
NOAH.
“I describe my style as a fun 90s skater punk. I like to incorporate “loud” pieces, or pieces with loud colour and/or patterns into my outfits. I think it compliments my personality quite well. However, lately, I’ve been focusing more on interesting silhouettes and more mature clothing, because my style as it stands just screams adolescence, which I don’t necessarily want anymore.”
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@noahlikesclothes /u/ImDeluxx
21.1.17 Topman Jacket A$AP x Guess T-Shirt Unbranded Pants Plain White Sneakers
“I wore this fit to the first date with my girlfriend, lol. I really like wearing some iteration of this fit to go on dates because it’s somewhat dressy while maintaining that punk-ish flare. I really like the way the pants interact with the shoes in this outfit and it’s an overall strong fit.”
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/u/ImDeluxx @noahlikesclothes
23.1.17 Anti Social Social Club T-Shirt Unbranded Pants Adidas Stan Smiths
“This outfit is the epitome of my style. It’s so goofy looking but I love it.”
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@noahlikesclothes /u/ImDeluxx
15.3.17 Vintage Store T-Shirt H&M Pants Vans Old Skools
“I’m much happier with how my fits flow together and how I use colour. I’ve started tucking in my shirts much more, and I’ve been wearing my clothes with much more confidence.”
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‘Kept his sticky in a Stussy pouch Ski mask, bloody ‘Preme hoodie tossing doobies out The window of the hoopty’ Earl Sweatshirt, Centurion
long reads vice:
WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE SO OBSESSED WITH SUPREME? What inspires someone to spend £2,000 on a secondhand jacket? Why do people build Supreme shrines in their bedrooms? What does Supreme have that other brands don’t?
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Vice ‘Why are so many people so obsessed with Supreme?’ Jul 19, 2016
It’s 9AM on a Thursday and 300 young men are lined up along a street in Soho. The guy at the front of the queue, 18-year-old Nick from Wembley, lets out a sort of pissed off yawn when I approach him. He’s been waiting here 23 hours, he says, trying to sleep on one of the camping chairs now piled up across the road. The guy at the back of the queue, 17-year-old Werner, flew into London this morning from his home in Finland, just to stand in this line for the rest of the day. In about an hour the doors to Supreme’s London store will be opened, and everyone here – tired Nick; patient Werner; teenagers from Cardiff, Newcastle and Canterbury; the guy wearing a Supreme sleeping bag like a slanket – will get their chance to walk inside, past the sculpture of a smiley white ghost, and flick through the first batch of caps, coats, hoodies and T-shirts released this season. The majority of queuers are heading straight for the shirt featuring a photo of gloomy vegetarian Morrissey. The photo he didn’t want Supreme to use, he said, because they once collaborated with a burger chain – and also just because he didn’t like the face he was pulling. Werner knows he isn’t getting the Morrissey shirt; it’ll have sold out long before he makes it inside, along with all the other stuff he actually wants. But that’s fine. He’s happy to pay for a flight and a hotel – and then queue for six hours – in the hope he’ll find anything in his size, even if it’s just a pair of boxer shorts. This is completely normal. Every time Supreme releases chunks of new stuff at its ten stores across Europe, America and Japan – which is every Thursday from the start of each collection – hundreds of people skip school or work to get first dibs. A couple of weeks after my visit, the London shop manager tells Supreme’s British disciples that if they’re planning a pilgrimage photo via BasementApproved
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they’ll need to start queuing on the Thursday morning – instead of the Wednesday night – because the weekly influx of rough sleepers in £300 trainers is rankling the local council. No other clothing brands command this kind of devotion. Ralph Lauren had its “Lo-Lifes”, a group of guys from Brooklyn who spent the early 90s stealing as much Polo as they could. Sneaker-heads tend to be Nike lifers. At some point down the line, your mum might get extremely into Boden. However, by Supreme standards, these are all middling brand obsessions – their followers the fair-weather fans to Supreme’s ultras: the kids who queue, the adult men who’ll pay silly money for vintage Supremebranded incense sticks. The fandom is essentially a subculture in itself. Europe’s largest Facebook page to buy, sell, trade and chat Supreme is SupTalk, which, with nearly 60,000 members, surely outnumbers the continent’s lesser-populated youth tribes – cybergoths, say, or people who are deadly serious about vaping. In this group you’ll find the many denominations of Supreme devotee, from ageing hype-beasts and 13-year-old rich kids to skaters, Insta-celebs and the stamp collectors of the streetwear generation: the guys – and they are always guys – who’ll buy up every colour of one specific cap, or the full set of Supreme x Stone Island jackets, or each and every T-shirt featuring the brand’s iconic box logo. Before each “drop day”, SupTalk members discuss their favourite upcoming items – the Morrissey T-shirt, for example, or the snakeskin shoe from an Air Max collaboration that’s released a couple of months after I visit the store. Online, these hyped up pieces sell out in milliseconds – for £100 you can buy a “bot” that purchases your desired piece as soon as it appears in the e-store – and Supreme produces limited stock, so when it’s gone, it’s gone.
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Until, that is, it appears again, on SupTalk or eBay, for considerably more than its original price. Some items go for twice what they cost on the rail, some for the sort of mark-ups more commonly applied to cinema popcorn. This is especially true for the last couple of years, as interest in the brand seems to have shot up exponentially. A £160 pink denim jacket from SS16 is flipped for nearly £2,250 to a buyer in Kyoto. On Grailed, a high-end clothing resale site, you’ll often find old Supreme for the same price as a plane ticket to Bangkok. Where privileged schoolboys once spent their parents’ dividends on PlayStations and plasma TVs, turning their noses up at fashion, they’re now paying “proxies” to queue up on drop day and buy them £130 pullovers. So why all this hysteria? Why do people build Supreme shrines in their bedrooms and not get embarrassed about it? Why are teenagers buying plane tickets to pick up a pair of boxer shorts? What kind of neurochemical reactions drive you to buy eight near-identical versions of the same very expensive T-shirt? Why, fundamentally, do so many people become so obsessed with Supreme? Hype is the most cited reason: that the buzz around the brand is what sustains that same buzz; that a sighting of Drake or Kanye in Supreme is what inspires people to bid themselves into bankruptcy when the same item appears on eBay. But there has to be more to it than that. Surely humans – the most evolved of all land mammals, creators of space stations and two-man umbrellas – aren’t that easily swayed? Equally, if you’re the kind of person who actively worries about what’s cool and buzzy, it follows that you’d lose interest in Supreme the more popular it becomes – yet the brand doesn’t seem to be shedding any die-hard followers as it continues to grow (bar a few cool-guy
commenters in SupTalk who’ll slag off anyone who only started wearing Supreme this year). You could also argue that the brand just produces really nice clothes – and, for some people, that’s undoubtedly why they’ll dip in and out. But for others, the levels of devotion have to be provoked by something more than cotton and thread. In 1994, Supreme opened as a skate shop in lower Manhattan. Press-shy founder James Jebbia declined to be interviewed for this feature, but told Interview Magazine that skate companies in the early-90s catered more to 13-year-old suburbanites than older skaters in cities like New York, who wanted to avoid dressing like awkward man-children in the hope girls might pay them some attention. To remedy that problem, the shop started making T-shirts in small runs; and then hoodies and sweaters; then shoes in collaboration with Nike and Clarks, coats with The North Face and Stone Island, hoodies with Comme Des Garcons and jeans with APC. New T-shirts featured the work of freaky surrealist painter H.R. Giger and pioneering hentai artist Toshio Maeda, skate decks the designs of contemporary artists like Richard Prince, John Baldessari and Jeff Koons. Supreme morphed from a bricks and mortar hangout for downtown skate kids to a cult global brand whose eclectic output rivals that of some of the world’s most established fashion houses. Through all that, Supreme has continued to make a limited amount of product. This, says Jebbia, is because “we don’t want to get stuck with stuff nobody wants”. But considering the online shop sells out minutes after anything new is added, being straddled with a warehouse full of dead stock doesn’t seem too much of a worry. Instead, your GCSE Economics teacher might argue, ploughing into your life to weigh in on Supreme’s business model, keeping supply low is an effective way to create demand. At his home
in West London, Musa Ali, a Supreme collector, explains: “In some regards, what makes people want to buy Supreme is the competitive, social aspect – to be able to go out in public and feel like you’re less likely to be wearing clothes that everyone else is wearing.” But why? Why do we place so much value on unique stuff ? Who is actually going to be impressed that your kitchen tiles are one of a kind? Nobody. Nobody gives a fuck about your bespoke kitchen tiles. But then, really, it’s not about other people; it’s about you. “In evolutionary terms, we all collected,” says Dr Dimitrios Tsivrikos, consumer psychologist at University College London. “We collect articles or resources to survive, but survival doesn’t only rest upon what we need physically. We need, psychologically, to distinguish ourselves. In the past, tribes would decorate themselves with feathers or precious stones to set them apart from other tribe members and attract potential mates. In the same way, collecting Supreme really allows people to build their identities with rare objects.” Thing is, the average Gary and Sue aren’t going to realise your ultra-rare, Sopranos-inspired box logo tee took you eight months and £900 to secure. To them, it’s just a T-shirt, like the ones you get in H&M or on the telly. However, in psychological terms – says Tsivrikos – that’s of little importance: “Millennials in particular are very aware of different consumer tribes; they look to inspire or impress peers who share the same kind of interests as them, who will recognise that particular T-shirt. So really, we do it for a very small group of people.” Back in the queue on the first drop day of the season, this couldn’t be more obvious. Everyone’s come dressed in their Thursday best: the kind of ultra-rare coats, hoodies and T-shirts you’ll often
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see described as “grails” – as in “highly coveted” – by SupTalk members. “The appeal is all in the exclusivity,” admits 19-year-old Londoner Nelly, waiting for his proxy to deliver the Morrissey T-shirt he ordered. “If it’s got a box logo on it, people will buy it. People want to be seen to be wearing Supreme, and there’s no better way to communicate that than with the box.” Tayler Prince-Fraser, one of SupTalk’s administrators, agrees. “You see kids spending hundreds of pounds on something that has ‘Supreme’ plastered all over it,” he says over the phone. “And I think that’s less for the design aesthetic and more to let everyone know that it’s Supreme.” That these kids are keen to let everyone know they’re wearing Supreme represents another important psychological factor in the brand’s success. “They’ve got a lot of things going for them,” says Jonathan Gabay, author of Brand Psychology: Consumer Perceptions, Corporate Reputations. “But importantly, Supreme was started in the right bit of New York by skaters. That makes it authentic, or seen to be authentic. The fact that they’ve brought in other designers over the years is irrelevant; it all goes back to the fact that the original people who wore this stuff were authentic – they weren’t wearing it because it was trendy.” Over the past decade or so, a huge amount of importance has been put on “authenticity”, both by brands and individuals. We’re terrified of being exposed as fakes; being called a poser can be hurtful to some because it implies they’re living a kind of false reality – that they don’t have ownership over their own self. Granted, that sounds a bit strong in a discussion about a clothing brand, but psychologically it all plays a role. “A brand is an extension of one’s self –
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psychologically, in terms of how you want the world to see you, or what you want the world to believe you are,” says Gabay. “But deeper than that: what you believe you are, through that brand.” Supreme has its detractors – those who, bizarrely, get very offended by what other people choose to wear, and then kick up a fuss about it online. But that’s not stopping waves of new fans from developing an obsession with the brand, whether it’s via that subconscious hunt for authenticity or because, like Musa and Akbar, they’re psychologically pre-disposed to hoarding with a purpose. What’s left to be seen is how long Supreme holds out. Physical growth has been intentionally slow: the brand has only opened two new stores in the past six years. But if Supreme continues to reach more people at the rate it’s been reaching them, it will be harder to maintain the sense of exclusivity and authenticity the brand’s been so successful at trading on. “I can’t help but feel that’s already deteriorating a little,” says Musa. “Especially since the opening of more stores.” That said, if any brand is in control of its image, it’s Supreme – so you get the sense they’ve got a fair few years left at the top of the streetwear pile, no matter how many stores they open along the way.
"i'm a 19 year old techwear goon based in the netherlands. i'm just trying to shoot interesting visuals for the streetwear & general fashion community."
BENJI VAN GEENE
/u/voidthealchemist @voidthealchemist
ONU.IS Reversible Longsleeve Loredana Pinasco Cargo Joggers Rick Owens Springblades
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WHAT DID YOU WEAR TODAY?
HUNTER DENNIS
HUNTER DENNIS 78
/u/sirgrapes @huntsdennis
MKI Boiled Wool Hat Palace Crib Hoodie Urban Outfitters Chinos Vans Old Skools
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@huntsdennis /u/sirgrapes
Supreme Script Logo Tee H&M Sweat Shorts Adidas Stan Smiths
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/u/sirgrapes
@huntsdennis
With over 200,000 subscribers, /r/streetwear has become a hub for all streetwear related news, articles and rumours. The subreddit allows for users to share their own thoughts and feelings on different topics and express themselves through fashion. The huge community enables users to leave feedback on one another's outfits, style and creativity.
What is your least favourite thing about /r/ streetwear? People can be very critical, and frankly elitist. Something that comes with the territory, especially around fashion because it's all about making yourself look good. What's your 'grail' and why? My grail is the Acronym GT-J28 jacket. Looks so good but they're impossible to find and so, so expensive when they are up for sale. Have you noticed the sub becoming more and more popular over the past couple of years? Yeah ever since I joined as a mod a little over a year ago it's skyrocketed. That's when the sub became more structured and we starting seeing a massive increase in unique hits. After the WDYWT thread was removed we also saw a huge increase in uniques and daily new subs due to exposure on the front page.
What trend in streetwear do you hate? Those stupid checkered Vans. They're so so ugly but everyone has a pair. God I hate them.
What is your favourite thing about /r/streetwear? The broad community - we have such a range of styles from techwear, to athletic style, to ninja-core, to preppy. There’s something for everyone, and yet you can get so much information about each individual style from so many different people. It’s very cool to see such a broad range of people come together. Answered by /r/streetwear moderator - /u/MrRikka
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/u/jordanthinkz
/u/lilmisskuta
/u/morning-ti
credits
Alex Robertson
Jeremy K
‘Supreme’ Week 16 Photography @ _arobertson_*
www.reddit.com/u/thejeka @jdotkdot*
A.N
Koven Wei
www.reddit.com/u/PhoDeNguyen @phodenguyen*
www.reddit.com/u/redtailspeed123 @kovenwei*
Benji van Geene
K.S
www.reddit.com/u/voidthealchemist @voidthealchemist*
www.reddit.com/u/kiwidu @mayonnaise_d
Grailed
Noah
www.grailed.com ‘An Introduction to Techwear’ May 25, 2016
www.reddit.com/u/ImDeluxx @noahlikesclothes*
Highsnobiety
Vice
www.highsnobiety.com ‘Fashion History Lessons: Shawn Stussy’ Jan 22, 2016
www.vice.com ‘Why are so many people so obsessed with Supreme?’ Jul 19, 2016
Hunter Dennis www.reddit.com/u/sirgrapes @huntersdennis
90
Leeds College of Art, 2017 Dan Hart-Davies