South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Line between streetwear, fashion has faded
In late 2019, Virgil Abloh, the boundary-smashing designer who died last year, gave an interview to Dazed in which he declared the end of streetwear.
“I would definitely say it’s gonna die, you know?” Abloh said. “Like, its time will be up.” That statement immediately engendered a mass freak-out pretty much among anyone who had seen him as the prophet of a new contemporary dress code, one that smashed the rules of the old establishment, finding power in sweatshirts and sneakers rather than suits. Suddenly he was changing his mind?
Abloh ended up walking his statement back a bit — he told Vogue he wasn’t saying streetwear would be gone, gone; it always comes back — but two years after he made his prediction, there’s little question he was right. “Streetwear” is indeed dead.
“I can’t even define it anymore,” said Arby Li, the vice president for content strategy at Hypebeast, the website founded in 2005 as a streetwear fan blog that became a brand unto itself and went public in 2016.
It’s not that, as was assumed when Abloh first spoke, everyone has gotten tired of the hoodies, sneakers and T-shirts that were the basic building blocks of that sector known as streetwear, though not by any means its defining characteristics. It’s that those hoodies, sneakers and T-shirts have become so fully absorbed by the high fashion establishment that the line between streetwear and fashion has effectively disappeared. Streetwear has become fashion or fashion has become streetwear, depending on how you want to look at it.
“It has simply become the platform on which the whole system stands,” said Demna, the creative director
of Balenciaga. Last July, Balenciaga held its first couture show in 50 years, to wild acclaim — and is also the sixth most popular brand on Hypebeast.
What does it even mean?
“I’d like to have a conversation with my community about why anyone ever decided to call it ‘streetwear’ ” in the first place, said Rhuigi Villaseñor, the founder of Rhude, the Los Angeles label that specializes in crossbreeding luxury and streetwear. (He was named creative director of Swiss luxury brand Bally this year.)
Heron Preston, the founder of an eponymous brand (his full name is Heron Preston Johnson), who began his career as a member of Been Trill, the DJ and art collective of coolness co-founded by Abloh, agreed.
“I never really identified with it or wanted to use it,” Preston said of the term “streetwear.” Heron Preston is part of New Guards Group, the Italian company that applied the luxury conglomerate model to streetwear and that is now
owned by Farfetch, the e-commerce conglomerate. But, Preston continued: “I was forced to because in some ways it’s an instant invitation into a culture. There are all sorts of associations that come up when you say that word.”
Streetwear-the-fashion-sector was born in the 1980s and ’90s at the intersection of skate and surf kid culture, hip-hop and underground art: a reaction against an industry in which the creators could not see themselves or their value system.
Its godparents were Shawn Stussy, who founded Stüssy in California in 1980; Nigo, who opened A Bathing Ape in Tokyo in 1993; and James Jebbia, who opened Supreme in 1994, all designers without any formal fashion training in art school or ateliers. (When Jebbia received a menswear award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2018, he said, “I’ve never considered Supreme to be a fashion company or myself a designer.”) Yet their use of graphics with casual clothing as a canvas became an instant badge of belonging and a collectible.
They eschewed the filters of the runway or glossy magazines for direct communication, generated obsessive interest via secret product drops and otherwise used rising social technologies to blow a raspberry at the established order. But dress got deconsecrated and inclusivity became a necessity. “Elevated streetwear” — labels like Off-White and Vetements — brought their shows and price points to the Paris runways.
When Abloh was named artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear in 2018, it was, said Li of Hypebeast, a “pivotal moment.” And his appointment was followed, in quick succession, by the naming of Matthew Williams — like Abloh and Johnson of Heron Preston an alumna of Been Trill — to the top spot at Givenchy and Nigo as artistic director at Kenzo.
None of them limited their output to hoodies and tees, yet all the appointments were framed first as a shock to the system, then as a trend. Even when Villaseñor was named to Bally, news reports almost all labeled him a “streetwear” designer, implying some sort of transgression.
But, as Abloh said in that Dazed interview, “what seems preposterous actually becomes the new norm.”
The ‘everything’ 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 for me?” said Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But, she said, they have also been used to marginalize designers, and what was a badge of difference has been turned into a box.
In July 2021, Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss became the first Black American designer officially on the Paris couture schedule (even though the show was held in New York), a strategic decision taken in part to shut down attempts to categorize him as a streetwear designer.
“Calling someone a ‘streetwear designer’ is a way to dismiss them,” said Tremaine Emory, the founder and designer of Denim Tears, a brand that uses jeans to tell the story of the Black American experience. “It’s a means of control.”
A Denim Tears “Tyson Beckford” sweater and “cotton wreath jeans” are part of the Met’s current Costume Institute show, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” alongside giant ballgowns from Oscar de la Renta and gold sequins from Norman Norell.
But the “streetwear” implication, Emory said, is that the creators are not real fashion designers; that they somehow don’t come with the same pedigree, and their output is less artistic. He said there was an element of, “How dare you charge this much for a T-shirt? How dare you claim entree?”
Yet plenty of fashion designers who are now considered part of the canon come from outside the art school system, including Raf Simons, who studied industrial design, Miuccia Prada, who studied politics, and Rei Kawakubo, who studied ethics. And lots of clothes once considered lesser are now part of fashion’s genetic code: ready-towear, sportswear, the American system of separates built on utility and practicality and, Steele of FIT said, once dismissed by the doyennes of Paris.
Demna calls the idea that streetwear should be separate from high fashion a synonym for the “dysfunction” of the industry. “It has become an integral part of fashion, and is there to stay,” he said. The real meaning of streetwear, after all, is simply what is worn on the street. Which is everything.