About

Supreme is a streetwear clothing brand based in SoHo in New York City. Due to the brand's limited releases, which often feature special collaborations, and low quantities of clothing for sale, their clothing and other merchandise has become highly coveted in skateboarder and hip hop culture.

History

The first Supreme store was first opened by James Jebbia in 1994 in SoHo. Jebbia had helped create other skateboarding and streetwear brands at that time including Stussy and Union NYC. The original logo, which is now one of the store's most popular shirts was based off the art of Barbara Kruger, a popular editorial and fine artist of the 1960s.^[1] The store continued to gain popularity, especially in the New York skating scene. In the early 2010's, the brand gained immense popularity as Tyler, The Creator of Odd Future, who wears the brand's clothing often, had a hit with his single "Yonkers," thereby growing the Odd Future fanbase. Other artists that have worn Supreme in the past include Kanye West, Drake, A$AP Rocky, Wiz Khalifa, Three 6 Mafia, as well as celebrities including Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, and Kermit the Frog.

Online Presence

Supreme is the subject of heavy discussion around the Internet, specifically fashion or streetwear sites, based off the price of their clothing and the brands notability. The subreddit for Supreme, /r/supremeclothing has over 17,000 subscribers. The store for Supreme clothing, supremenewyork.com,^[4] is well-known for how quickly clothing sells out, often due to users creating bots to buy merchandise for them for resale. In July of 2015, Supreme banned bots from shopping on its site by monitoring IP site refreshes.^[7]

Supreme Resale Communities

Due to the limited quantities and extreme hype, Supreme clothing is resold for high prices, almost always twice the price of retail, on sites such as eBay ^[2]. Other resellers choose to use social media such as Instagram. The #Supreme tag has over 3 million posts^[3] on Instagram; #supremeforsale, which is specifically used in commerce, has more than 450,000 posts.^[5] These hashtags are also used on Twitter. In late 2015, Complex released a documentary discussing the secondary market for Supreme goods entitled "Sold Out." The documentary was released in pieces, and then as a full length video, with all videos in total accumulating over 1,200,000 views.^[6]

Image Macros

In February of 2017, 4-panel image macros mocking the high pricing of Supreme and the hype surrounding the brand began spreading on meme-focused subreddits, particularly /r/MemeEconomy. In the images, the first panel shows a generic item, followed by a person evaluating its worth in the second panel. The third panel shows the same item with a Supreme logo on it and the fourth panel shows the same person grossly overestimating the item's worth. The most popular was posted by jeremyach^[8] on February 15th and gained over 3,000 upvotes.

Search Interest

External References