Streetwear, the most significant stylistic movement of the late twentieth century, began in a surf shop in Laguna Beach and on the handball courts of the Lower East Side. It did not begin, as every history of Parisian couture would imply, in Paris. Its archive is not the sketchbook but the disposable camera.

Shawn Stussy had been scrawling his surname across surfboards since 1980. By 1984 he was printing it on T-shirts. The letters came from his signature—a graffiti-adjacent scrawl that the Japanese magazine Popeye would spend the 1990s trying to explain. Hiroshi Fujiwara, in Tokyo, saw it and understood immediately. The International Stussy Tribe, an invitation-only group of designers, DJs, and shop owners, circulated the logo from Tokyo to Paris to London in bootleg and authorised editions that, by 1992, had blurred entirely.

Supreme, 1994

When James Jebbia opened Supreme at 274 Lafayette Street in April 1994, the store was a rectangle with skate ramps bolted to the floor and a few folded T-shirts stacked on a table. The logo—red, white, Futura Heavy Oblique—was a direct lift from the artist Barbara Kruger, who would later call it "a ridiculous clusterfuck of uncooperative arrogance." The clusterfuck resold, by 2017, for a billion dollars.

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Streetwear is not a style. It is a system of scarcity, sociality, and speed.

The Runway Concedes

For twenty years the luxury houses pretended not to notice. Then, in January 2017, Kim Jones sent a collaboration with Supreme down the Louis Vuitton men’s runway. The monogrammed duffel bag that emerged—Louis Vuitton’s damier rebroadcast through Supreme’s box logo—was not the first streetwear piece in a European house, but it was the first that admitted defeat. Virgil Abloh arrived at Louis Vuitton men’s eighteen months later. The century turned.

The argument, now, is about ownership. Streetwear’s founders were, overwhelmingly, the children of immigrants and Black Americans. Its current economy is underwritten largely by LVMH. Whether the vocabulary can remain the vocabulary of its speakers, once their speech is being sold back to them at a markup, is the open question of the next collection.