How Supreme Went From Local Legend to Global Icon

From Before to ’94

Supreme might be perceived as the Godfather of Streetwear, but even Supreme had its own role model: Stüssy. A West Coast surf label founded by Shawn Stüssy, Stüssy dominated the latter half of the 1980s with outrageous graphics and a slew of celebrity cosigns. The brand was stocked in a little-known New York store called Union, managed by a young James Jebbia.

Stüssy soon opened a New York store and Jebbia jumped aboard, taking the position of store manager, while his place at Union was filled by Chris Gibbs (the same Chris Gibbs who owns and runs Union LA to this day).

In 1994, Jebbia departed from Stüssy to strike out on his own, opening an independent skate store on Lafayette Street carrying standard fare skateboarding gear, as well as branded merchandise bearing the store’s simple red box logo, a design inspired by Barbara Kruger’s declarative artwork.

Early Endorsements

The store itself and the Supreme logo quickly became territorial markings of New York’s then-marginal skate culture. Just as the skate world was turning away from the surf-inspired, vert-centric style of the West Coast toward the gritty, claustrophobic inner-city skate culture of the East, Supreme was inserting itself in the heart of the action.

Supreme’s momentum continued to build when a box logo T-shirt made a brief cameo in Larry Clark’s Kids. The film unleashed a torrent of acclaim and controversy upon its release in 1995, eventually becoming recognized as a quintessential snapshot of life for kids growing up in New York City. In retrospect, as amateur social historians mapped out the cultural cartography Harmony Korine and Clark had charted out in their film, the fact that Supreme was nestled in there, among the ephemera, became difficult to ignore.

East Meets West

Japan, long-known for its fascination with Western subcultural tribes such as punk, surf and mods, was effectively the vanguard of street fashion throughout the 1980s. The immersion of Japanese designers and consumers with street style was so deep that the scene’s largest cultural hub outside of the West was Tokyo’s Ura-Harajuku scene, a small shopping district in the Japanese capital that was the birthplace of many of today’s biggest streetwear brands including NEIGHBORHOOD, WTAPS and UNDERCOVER.

So when Japanese tourists began bringing home box logo tees from their trips to New York, it was clear something big was brewing. Japanese fashion mags started gushing about Supreme and skate culture, and news teams even jetted over to film segments about the store. What started as admiration soon became something of a symbiosis, with Supreme’s distinctively New York cuts and styles seeping into Tokyo streetwear design, and Supreme taking a leaf out of the Harajuku playbook with its array of quirky, unexpected branded accessories and homeware goods.

By 1998, Supreme had opened its first Tokyo flagship in Daikanyama. Two more followed in Osaka and Fukuoka that same year. For comparison, it took another six years for the U.S. to get its second store, in Los Angeles.

The Golden Years

By the early 2000s, Supreme was officially the West’s best-kept streetwear secret. In 2002 alone, the brand worked with Nike, on the first collaborative model of the company’s Nike SB Dunk, and A Bathing Ape. Or, put differently, with the biggest names in American sportswear and Japanese streetwear, respectively.

From there, cultural touch points came thick and fast. The most notable include Supreme’s series of photo tees, featuring celebrities wearing the box logo T-shirt, seasonal collaborations with The North Face, Vans and Timberland, and artist collaborations, placing works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince on Supreme products.

An LA store followed in 2004 and an online store opened for business in 2007, making the brand more accessible across the United States without achieving the kind of exposure that might have marked Supreme as a seasonal fad. In short, Supreme found itself on the threshold between local legend and world fame.

Culturally, it was a perfect storm. Tumblr had established itself as the quintessential platform for the post-MySpace generation. OFWGKTA were emblematic of this generation’s cross-pollinatory aesthetic, indiscriminately mixing punk, rap, goth, skate and prep styles both in style and in practice. Tyler, in turn, was the perfect poster boy for all of these enmeshed movements. And at the top of this pyramid of upward aspiration and downward influence, was Supreme, the alluring brand that, a bit like that Kids cameo, just seemed to be right in the middle of things, every step of the way.

The impact and influence is virtually impossible to downplay. Tumblr pages and Pinterest mood boards became flooded with box logos, particularly in the form of the brand’s iconic camp caps, which were a staple of Tyler’s style and became a must-have item when one featured in the music video for his breakout single, “Yonkers.” 

In the run-up to the 2011 MTV VMA Awards, message boards were flooded with consternation about what Supreme pieces Tyler might wear, and the effect this might have on their availability and price. When he stepped on stage to collect his award for Best New Artist in that season’s most coveted camp cap design, Supreme heads despaired, knowing the cap would now be an instant sellout (resellers, of course, rejoiced—the cap still sells for roughly four times its original price).

Now

Following the opening of Supreme’s second European flagship in Paris in 2016, things began moving much faster. In 2017, Supreme announced a monumental collaboration with legendary French fashion house Louis Vuitton. That same year, it was revealed Jebbia had sold a 50% stake in Supreme to the Carlyle Group, an American private equity firm better known for less-than-trendy investments in its diverse portfolio. 

Flush with cash, Supreme initiated a number of projects that ramped up operations, opening new stores in San Francisco and Milan, while increasing production to meet a demand that was now truly global. Seasonal collaborations became more frequent, especially with VF Corporation, an outdoors company that owns The North Face, Timberland and Vans; a sign of things to come.

Time revealed this to be the case. By late 2020, it was confirmed VF Corp had completed an acquisition of Supreme to the tune of $2.1 billion, with expectations that Supreme would bring in roughly $500 million of additional revenue to VF’s already mammoth income streams.

What Comes Next

Looking back, the story of Supreme is paradoxical. The brand skyrocketed to global fame by maintaining a mythos of secrecy and in-the-know for the better half of two decades. Its self-designation as “World Famous” was partly a tip-of-the-hat to the New York hip-hop culture that started it all and partly an ironic acknowledgement that the most respected name in street fashion was simultaneously one of the most overlooked. 

Whatever else can be said, it’s certainly not ironic anymore.

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