commercial thoroughfare it is now, so kids
from the boroughs and from New Jersey,
Long Island, and upstate could gather with-
out having to worry about being hassled by
the cops or encroaching on the upscale busi-
nesses that now dot the neighborhood. At
that time, there were no metal barricades or
security guards, though the notorious lines
of customers that would eventually necessi-
tate such things would start soon enough.
Out of sight, in an o∞ce 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. He was on a mission to
fill his perpetually empty shelves, impervi-
ous to the notion that something grand was
taking shape.
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. “I never really even thought of it, in
the very beginning, as a business,” he tells me.
“It was more of a hangout spot. 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. “It was raw,” he says of the
energy that the store tapped into. “It was a
specific attitude, and probably the DNA is
[still] there now, but it really was a pure New
York City kind of street skating.”
The appeal of Supreme was instant. Jen
Brill, who today is a prominent New York
creative director with close ties to the brand,
was an Upper East Side high-school student
in 1994, when she first started venturing to
Lafayette, just to see who was working at the
new skate shop. “It was the cutest boys with
the best styles and the shittiest attitudes,”
she says. “There was crazy energy around
the store. It didn’t feel like a shop. Because
they definitely didn’t want to sell you any-
thing. Maybe they didn’t even want you in
the store.”
Brill wasn’t the only one struck by what
was happening downtown. Skating had for
years enjoyed a gritty reputation in New
York, but suddenly the cultural fringes
were crashing into the mainstream. Kids
was released in 1995, but so was Clueless,
starring Alicia Silverstone, which depicted
a fundamentally di≠erent but equally styl-
ized kind of skate crew. That same year
ESPN held the first X-Games, a mass-market
spectacle that put skateboarding in the
undignified company of other “extreme
sports,” like street luge and sky surfing.
Twenty-five years later, as fads (like tele-
vised street luge) have fallen by the wayside,
Supreme remains a skate brand—a purveyor
of all the hard and soft goods one needs for
the sport. But it is something much more
than that, too. Since its beginning, in 1994,
Supreme has slowly worked its way to
the very center of culture and fashion. Or
more accurately, culture and fashion have
reconfigured themselves around Supreme.
Supreme’s clothing and accessories sell out
instantly, and the brand has become a fash-
ion-world collaborator of the highest caliber
with projects now under way with design-
ers high (Comme des Garçons, Undercover)
and low (Hanes, Champion). Though the
particulars of the privately held company’s
business are undisclosed, a $500 million
investment in 2017 from the multinational
private equity firm the Carlyle Group, for a
50 percent stake, put Supreme’s valuation
at $1 billion.
But 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. (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 appre-
ciate Supreme’s profound sway simply by
reading fashion magazines or style blogs,
which rarely, if ever, feature Supreme ads
or interviews with its founder. 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 merchan-
dise in those places. 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 peo-
ple who wear them do the talking.
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 interlocu-
tor—and provided perhaps the deepest and
most insightful articulation of his vision and
design philosophy that he’s yet o≠ered on
record. Jebbia’s life and business remain, for
the most part, a mystery to those who aren’t
part of his inner circle. What’s clear is that
he operates on his own terms and refuses to
make concessions based on what anyone else
wants or does.
“The reason that we do things the way we
do is because we respect the customer,” he
says. For Jebbia this is not a mere marketing
platitude but rather a kind of guiding, almost
sacred, principle. From the beginning, he
studied what was happening in the streets,
relying on what
Top: Supreme on
Lafayette Street, 1995.
Above: Original Supreme
crew (from left) Quim
Cardona, Chappy,
Keenan Milton, Gino
Iannucci, Harold Hunter,
Keith Hufnagel, and
Jon Buscemi in 1996.
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