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? Like, its time will be up,” he said, immediately engendering a mass freak-out, not just in fashion but among pretty much 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?
Mr. 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 lifestyle brand unto itself and went public in 2016.
It’s not that, as was assumed when Mr. Abloh first spoke, everyone has gotten tired of the hoodies and 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 and 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.
The people who buy one are buying the other; the designers of one have become the designers of the other; the values of each — cool, comfort, community — merged into one. The basics of streetwear are the basics of every fashion line, as much as jackets and ball gowns. (And jackets and ball gowns are starting to show up in many streetwear lines.)
It is as big a shift as when ready-to-wear merged with made-to-measure in the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, while the evolution has been taking place for a while, the “streetwear” designation lingers. As fashion week dawns, say many designers, it’s time to bury it.
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, who was named creative director of Swiss luxury brand Bally earlier this year.
Heron Preston, the founder of an eponymous brand (his full name is Heron Preston Johnson, but he goes by Heron Preston), who began his career as a member of Been Trill, the DJ and art collective of coolness co-founded by Mr. Abloh, agreed.
“I never really identified with it or wanted to use it,” Mr. 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, Mr. 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 from 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 Mr. Jebbia received a men’s wear 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 just as skating and snowboarding became official Olympic sports, so, too, their social uniforms seeped from the edges into the mainstream on the back (literally) of new industries and the democratization of communication. 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.
The old guard, desperate to stay relevant, went from flirting with the outsiders — Louis Vuitton collaborating with Supreme in 2017; Ralph Lauren collaborating with Palace in 2018 — to giving them the keys to the castle. (It helped that the “streetwear market” was estimated to be worth $185 billion by PWC in 2019.)
When Mr. Abloh was named artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear in 2018, it was, said Mr. Li of Hypebeast, a “pivotal moment.” And his appointment was followed, in quick succession, with the naming of Matthew Williams — like Mr. Abloh and Mr. 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 Mr. Villaseñor was named to Bally, news reports almost all labeled him a “streetwear” designer, implying some sort of transgression.
But, as Mr. 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 continued, 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 ball gowns from Oscar de la Renta and gold sequins from Norman Norell.
But the “streetwear” implication, Mr. 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. There’s an element, he said, 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-to-wear, sportswear, the American system of separates built on utility and practicality and, said Ms. Steele of F.I.T., once dismissed by the doyennes of Paris.
Demna calls the idea that streetwear should be somehow 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.
Indeed, as far as Mr. Villaseñor is concerned, what we are talking about when we talk about streetwear is just “clothes that serve people’s needs.”
“It’s a snapshot of our current time,” he said.
And that is the definition of fashion.
