What is streetwear and why is it trending everywhere?

For those who are involved in streetwear fashion, it is more than clothes – it is culture. Nowadays, fashion designers make a cult around their fashion ideas. Fashion revolution happened a couple of years ago, when streetwear clothes came into the fashion arena and took their position in fashion houses.

Simply put, streetwear is a style of casual clothing which became global in the 1990s. It grew from New York hip hop fashion and Californian surf culture to encompass elements of sportswear, punk, skateboarding and Japanese street fashion. Eventually haute couture became an influence. It commonly centers on “casual, comfortable pieces such as jeans, T-shirts, baseball caps, and sneakers”, and exclusivity through intentional product scarcity. Enthusiasts follow particular brands and try to obtain limited edition releases.

IN THE 1980S...

Streetwear style has been thought to be born out of New York city from the hip hop cultures of 1970s and 1980s. While some say, it has come from the Surf and Skate culture of California.

Early streetwear took inspirations from hip hop, punk, metal, sportswear etc.

In late 1980s, surf board designer Shawn Stussy began selling printed tshirts with his signature which he placed on his surfboards. He started from selling out of his own car parked at the beach, and later expanding the business to boutiques and overseas stores over the years. As popularity increased, stussy started exclusive sales to create scarcity and hype.

The communities that originally led streetwear were largely male dominated, and as such the style was originally adopted and driven by men, depicting traditionally masculine looks. In the beginning, streetwear was simple and an antidote to the elaborate, complicated styles that were in fashion at the time. The formula was straightforward: people wore T-shirts and hoodies because that’s what they liked. This uniform was tied to both comfort and self-expression.

HOW THE CULTURE GREW

Pioneers of the movement include James Jebbia, founder of skate brand Supreme, and Shawn Stussy, founder of surf brand Stüssy. Designer Dapper Dan played a pivotal role in elevating streetwear to luxury as early as the 1980’s out of Harlem, New York, creating styles for hip-hop artists who were shunned by traditional luxury brands at the time.

While the movement has roots in California and New York, other early adopters like Hiroshi Fujiwara and Nigo, both influential DJs and designers, were largely responsible for pioneering the street style and hip-hop scene in Japan in the 1980s. Like other major cultural movements, streetwear quickly rose simultaneously in major cities and regions throughout the globe.

And, like any major cultural movement, streetwear has not risen in a vacuum. Streetwear should not be viewed as a trend within fashion, but as the fashion leg of a larger shift that has given power to popular culture spanning fashion, art, and music and is largely driven by black culture.

POPULARITY OVER THE YEARS

The mindset that drives this popular culture shift appeared as early as the 1960s, when Andy Warhol questioned what constitutes contemporary art. In the 1970s, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring extended this conversation to street art, challenging traditional notions of who could access art and who it was for.

Hip-hop and rap similarly promoted a raw form of music motivated by rule-breaking and finding art and sound in unconventional ways. Streetwear is analogous to an artist’s street art or a hip-hop artist’s lyrics: picking a spot and dropping a signature.

This level of authenticity is unmatched elsewhere in the fashion industry, which has typically operated through a top-down effect. Insiders act as gatekeepers to the newest styles and trends. Streetwear has subverted this formula with a more democratic model.

With streetwear, the tastemakers are not only taking direction from style that comes from the streets, they are taking direction directly from the audience. It’s the consumer who has the power to determine what’s cool as much as the industry insider. The muscle of traditional fashion institutions, such as print publications and revered editors, has dwindled, while the opinions of general audiences have gained weight.

While a brand’s coolness, exclusivity, and status symbol have long been integral to fashion, streetwear introduces new key players: comfortable clothing and community. The exclusivity that drives streetwear, meanwhile, is driven more by know-how than financial capacity to purchase. For brands, tapping into this in-crowd mindset poses the highest barrier to entry.

For those who are involved in streetwear fashion, it is more than clothes – it is culture. Nowadays, fashion designers make a cult around their fashion ideas. Fashion revolution happened a couple of years ago, when streetwear clothes came into the fashion arena and took their place in fashion houses. The streetwear brand “Supreme” with their graphic logos tied to hip-hop, was evaluated at $1 billion company in 2017 by the Carlyle Group (Clark & Hughes 2017). In comparison, Michael Kors sold a stake in his company in 2011 at $2.5 billion (25 percent of the entire accessories industry). A huge investment in “Supreme” suggests that the Carlyle Group bets on potential turnover of the “Supreme” company and presumes “Supreme” can have 25 percent of the whole streetwear industry.

The point is not only in the size of the fashion industry but in the content of fashion brands and reshaping of them during the time.