‘Streetwear’ is dead? Understand the mixes and transformations of this style

The New York Times

In late 2019, daring fashion designer Virgil Abloh, who defied boundaries and died last year, gave an interview to Dazed magazine in which he declared the end of “streetwear”. “I would say for sure he’s going to die, you know?” Abloh said. “Your time will surely come.”

The statement immediately caused a collective tantrum among virtually everyone who saw him as the prophet of a new contemporary dress code, a code that shattered the rules of the old establishment and found power in outerwear and sneakers rather than suits and suits. Was Abloh suddenly changing his mind?

The stylist ended up stepping back a little from his statement. He explained to Vogue that he didn’t mean that “streetwear” would actually disappear; style always returns. But two years after he made his prediction, there is little doubt that he was right. Streetwear is dead, really.

“I don’t even know how to define it right now,” said Arby Li, vice president of content strategy at Hypebeast, a site founded in 2005 as a blog for streetwear fans that eventually became a lifestyle brand. and for going public in 2016.

It’s not that, as many people assumed when Abloh made his statement, everyone had grown tired of “hoodies”, sneakers and T-shirts, the basic building blocks of the industry known as “streetwear” (although they are by no means its most definitive.)

And yes, hoodies, t-shirts and sneakers were so absorbed by the fashion elite that the distinction between streetwear and high fashion simply disappeared. Streetwear has become fashion or fashion has become streetwear, depending on how you prefer to look at it.

“Streetwear has simply become the platform on which the system is built,” said Demna, creative director at Balenciaga. In July 2021, Balenciaga held its first couture show in 50 years and was highly praised – also becoming the sixth most popular brand on Hypebeast.

People who buy streetwear also buy high fashion, and designers who design streetwear also design high fashion. The values ​​of the two categories –cool, comfort, community– merged. The streetwear staple has become the staple of all fashion lines beyond blazers and ball gowns. (And many streetwear lines are now starting to offer blazers and prom dresses.)

It’s as big a turning point as when prêt-à-porter merged with bespoke sewing in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet, while the evolution has been underway for some time, the “streetwear” designation persists. As the “fashion weeks” season approaches, it’s high time to ditch it, say many stylists.

WHAT DOES “STREETWEAR” MEAN?

“I’d like to have a conversation with my community about why someone decided to call this type of fashion ‘streetwear,'” said Rhuigi Villaseñor, founder of Rhude, a Los Angeles fashion house that specializes in combining luxury and “streetwear.” “. (He was appointed to the creative directorship of Swiss luxury goods group Bally this year.)

Heron Preston, founder of the brand that bears his name (his full name is Heron Preston Johnson, but he goes by Heron Preston), began his career as a member of Been Trill, a DJ and cool art collective of which Abloh was a member. of the founders, and agrees with Villaseñor.

“I never identified with that designation or used it,” Preston said of the term “streetwear.” He is part of the New Guards Group, an Italian company that applied the luxury goods conglomerates model to streetwear, and is now controlled by the e-commerce conglomerate Farfetch. But, Preston continued, “I was forced to accept it because, somehow, it was like an instant invitation to be part of a culture. There are all sorts of associations that arise when you say that word.”

Streetwear as a fashion segment was born in the 1980s and 1990s, at the intersection of skate and surf youth culture, hip-hop and underground art: a reaction to an industry in which creators didn’t see each other and didn’t see each other. your value system.

Streetwear’s godfathers were Shawn Stussy, who created Stüssy, California in 1980; Nigo, who established the A Bathing Ape brand in Tokyo in 1993; and James Jebbia, who started Supreme in 1994. All of them were designers with no formal training in fashion, art schools or studios. (When Jebbia received a menswear award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2018, he said that he “never considered Supreme as a fashion company or thought of myself as a fashion designer.”) But the use of graphics for which pieces of casual clothes served as the canvas, which they created became an immediate badge of integration and spawned many collectibles.

They gave up the filters that runways and fashion magazines offered in exchange for direct communication, generated obsessive consumer interest through secret product “drops,” and employed the ascendant technologies of social media to completely bypass the established order.

But in the same way that skateboarding and snowboarding became official Olympic sports, the social uniforms of their practitioners have infiltrated from the margins into the mainstream of culture with the help of new economic sectors and the democratization of communication. Clothing is no longer a sacred subject and inclusion has become a necessity. High-end streetwear brands like Off-White and Vetements have taken their shows and comradely prices to the fashion catwalks in Paris.

The old guard, desperate to maintain relevance, has gone from flirting with intruders — Louis Vuitton collaborated with Supreme in 2017 and Ralph Lauren collaborated with Palace in 2018 — to handing them the keys to the castle. (The fact that the “streetwear” market was estimated at $185 billion by PwC at the end of 2019 certainly helped.)

When Abloh was appointed as artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton in 2018, said Hypebeast’s Li, “it was a watershed moment.” His appointment was followed, in quick succession, by Matthew Williams (as Abloh and Johnson of Heron Preston, alumnus of Been Trill) to helm Givenchy and Nigo as artistic director of Kenzo.

None of them limited their production to “hoodies” and t-shirts, but all these indications were initially framed as a shock to the system and soon after as a trend. Even when Villaseñor was hired by Bally, reports almost all identified him as a “streetwear” stylist, which seemed to point to some form of wrongdoing.

But as Abloh said in that interview with Dazed, “what seemed absurd actually becomes the new norm.”

THE COMMON TERM

Labels like “streetwear” and high fashion aren’t just semantic categories. They are social reference points. “People want to know the meaning of the clothes they’re buying: is this outfit for me?” said Valerie Steele, museum director at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But, she said, the terms were also used to marginalize designers and what was once a badge of difference turned into compartmentalization.

In July 2021, Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss became the first black American designer to participate in the official calendar of Parisian fashion shows (although the show took place in New York), a strategic decision made in part to block attempts to categorize him as a “streetwear” stylist.

“Calling someone a ‘streetwear’ stylist is a way of dismissing them,” said Tremaine Emory, founder and stylist of Denim Tears, a brand that uses jeans as a way to tell the story of the black American experience. “It’s a means of control.”

A Tyson Beckford sweater and cotton jeans by Denim Tears are part of the “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibition, which is on view at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, alongside giant ballgowns by Oscar de la Renta and Norman Norell’s golden sequin models.

But the implication of the term “streetwear,” Emory said, is that creators are not true fashion designers; that they somehow don’t have the same pedigree, and their creations are less artistic. He said there was also an element of “how dare you charge that price for a shirt?” and “how dare you seek admission?”

But many designers now considered part of the canon came from outside the art school system, including Raf Simons, who studied industrial design, and Miuccia Prada, who studied politics; Rei Kawakubo studied ethics. And many clothes in the past seen as inferior and, as Steele says, disregarded by the deans of the industry in Paris, have become part of the genetic code of fashion: ready-to-wear, sportswear and the American system of separate pieces built on utility and practicality.

Demna classifies the idea that “streetwear” should be separated from high fashion as synonymous with the “dysfunction” of the sector. “Streetwear has become an integral part of fashion and is here to stay,” he said. The real meaning of the term, after all, is clothes to wear on the street. Which describes all the clothes.

In fact, at least in Villaseñor’s opinion, what we talk about when we talk about “streetwear” are just “clothes that meet people’s needs”. “It’s a portrait of our era,” he said. And that’s the definition of fashion.