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“They would wear cool shit they wouldn't wear skate clothes. “The influence was the people who were around the shop-the skaters,” Jebbia says. From the beginning, he studied what was happening in the streets, relying on what he observed, not on himself or another designer, to chart the brand's creative path.
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For Jebbia this is not a mere marketing platitude but rather a kind of guiding, almost sacred, principle.
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“The reason that we do things the way we do is because we respect the customer,” he says. What's clear is that he operates on his own terms and refuses to make concessions based on what anyone else wants or does. Jebbia's life and business remain, for the most part, a mystery to those who aren't part of his inner circle. James Jebbia, who, as ever, guides virtually every aspect of the company that he founded, declined to be interviewed in person for this story but agreed instead to respond to my written questions via an in-house interlocutor-and provided perhaps the deepest and most insightful articulation of his vision and design philosophy that he's yet offered on record. Loud as the clothing can be-red fur coats, leopard-print pants, “FUCK”-emblazoned denim-the brand is nearly silent, letting the clothes and the people who wear them do the talking. You certainly wouldn't learn of the brand's influence by shopping in malls and department stores-Supreme doesn't have any wholesale accounts, so you won't find its merchandise in those places. (In addition to the New York locations, there are now outposts in Los Angeles, Paris, and London, as well as six in Japan.) And you might not fully appreciate Supreme's profound sway simply by reading fashion magazines or style blogs, which rarely, if ever, feature Supreme ads or interviews with its founder. “It was a specific attitude, and probably the DNA is there now, but it really was a pure New York City kind of street skating.”īut you wouldn't necessarily know it by walking into a Supreme store today, where the music is still loud and the Nag Champa is still thick in the air. “It was raw,” he says of the energy that the store tapped into. You know, a place for that specific crew.” Supreme's start coincided with the making of Korine's first film, Kids, directed by Larry Clark, which famously depicted that same crew's style and antics downtown. “I never really even thought of it, in the very beginning, as a business,” he tells me. One of those who flocked to the store was the filmmaker Harmony Korine, who had moved into his first apartment, just a couple of blocks away, a few months before Supreme opened. He was on a mission to fill his perpetually empty shelves, impervious to the notion that something grand was taking shape. Out of sight, in an office or a back room, the man who conjured it all into being-Supreme's founder, James Jebbia-could be found working the phones, haranguing his suppliers, coaxing another drop of tees, hoodies, and caps. At that time, there were no metal barricades or security guards, though the notorious lines of customers that would eventually necessitate such things would start soon enough. In those days Lafayette Street wasn't the commercial thoroughfare it is now, so kids from the boroughs and from New Jersey, Long Island, and upstate could gather without having to worry about being hassled by the cops or encroaching on the upscale businesses that now dot the neighborhood. The locus of it all was ostensibly a store-but back then, when it first opened, in 1994, retail concerns seemed incidental to the real purpose of Supreme, which sprung to life as a frenetic meet-up spot for the growing downtown New York skate community. As you got closer you could hear the music echoing through the canyon of Manhattan, then see the crowd outside the building, sometimes 40 or 50 deep, spilling off the sidewalk onto Lafayette Street.
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From a block away, you could smell the Nag Champa in the air, like a sandalwood smoke signal.