Supreme’s first brick-and-mortar store opened on Lafayette Street in SoHo in 1994, long before high-end stores and trendy restaurants came along. So when James Jebbia, the brand’s founder, chose a Los Angeles location, he listened to that same instinct to settle in an unexpected part of the city.
Today, the same stretch of Fairfax Avenue Supreme chose in 2004 is the city’s unofficial streetwear corridor. The sidewalks are crowded with young men and women in baggy pants, hoodies and overpriced sneakers. Now there’s Tyler, the Creator’s Golf Wang store, the Hundreds, and the Flight Club sneaker resale store.
But Supreme has left the building.
In February, the brand opened its 8,500-square-foot flagship on the Sunset Strip. It occupies the former Tower Records space, a store that for decades defined that particular bend of the street, and the music-oriented milieu that grew around it.
The low-slung white building has the Supreme Red Box logo on it. Inside, the walls are dominated by hand-painted murals – a Josh Smith reaper; Nate Lowman’s signature bullet holes – but it’s the 36-foot-wide, 40-foot-deep skate bowl hanging from a raised deck that’s the focus, a much larger version of what used to be in the Fairfax store. In moving, Supreme may no longer feel that David beats Goliath, but that he becomes Goliath.
The brand is no longer the sassy upstart that only appealed to a small group of gruff skateboarders, but a global company with huge name recognition.
It is difficult to determine exactly when the tide turned. It could have been around 2011 when members of the music group Odd Future wore Supreme on a string of high-profile performances. Or it could have been in 2017, when Supreme teamed up with Louis Vuitton — a moment that has come full circle from when Louis Vuitton issued a cease and desist order to Supreme in 2000 for using its monogram motif on a series of skateboard decks.
Or maybe it was the 2020 acquisition of Supreme by VF Corporation, a conglomerate that owns brands like Vans and North Face. The deal valued Supreme at $2.1 billion – a staggering sum for a company that primarily trades in T-shirts and snapback hats.
But for many, Supreme’s value doesn’t just start and end with the products.
‘It’s hard to see your favorite brand explode’
Looking back over 30 years, Supreme can be seen as an example of how to stay ahead in an industry increasingly controlled by a few big companies.
The brand was built in part to be the arbiter of a new playbook that has been widely copied by up-and-coming labels and legacy brands alike. It essentially pioneered the so-called drop system: releasing a limited supply of products at a specific time and place, often creating queues in front of their stores that doubled as free advertising; the drops often sold out.
It also collaborated with artists, musicians and other fashion brands ranging from high-end (Burberry, Louis Vuitton) to everyday (Dickies, Hanes).
“I still love the Fairfax store, but we became limited by space and outgrew it,” Mr. Jebbia wrote in an email. “I was looking at the Tower Records place for a long time, and just like when we first went to Fairfax, we didn’t want to be in an obvious area like on Melrose, or La Brea, or Beverly Hills .”
Javier Nunez, 40, who worked at the Fairfax location, said some people in the area said they wouldn’t make it. He fondly recalled that the neighborhood was so quiet back then that he would set up a garbage can at a nearby crosswalk to perform skate tricks.
Skate shops often serve as a kind of headquarters or a place to just waste time. Sunset Boulevard’s move mirrors that of Supreme in New York in 2019 when it moved to a flashier space on the corner of Bowery and Spring. For some, these movements represent a transfer from clubhouses to temples of capitalism.
“They still have skating very much in their hearts,” says Eugene Lardy, who runs streetwear newsletter Street Night Live, “but the brand has clearly changed and evolved over the last decade.”
Mr. Lardy, 29, was first introduced to Supreme in 2008 and envisioned the brand as a conduit between the insular world of skateboarding and the wider culture. “I went through the phase where I thought they were sold out, like it was becoming something bigger than something for hardcore skaters. It’s hard to see your favorite brand explode too much, and then bring in outside investment.”
“I understand why people get upset,” Mr. Lardy said. “But I also understand natural growth in a business cycle. You always want to keep growing.”
Supreme is old enough now to mean different things to different people. “The clothes feel very detached from skateboarding,” says Jack Bravstein, a skateboarder and writer in New York. For the 22-year-old Bravstein, a major moment was seeing the 2018 Supreme-produced film “Blessed” directed by director William Strobeck, which highlights the label’s in-house skateboarding program. “They’re still pushing this aspect of sagacity and creativity in their videos, which I think is the most important part of the brand right now,” said Mr. Bravstein.
“But you can walk into the Supreme store and never have touched a skateboard, or not know it was a skate shop,” he added. “So in that respect they killed it, as a brand. They know what they are doing.”
All the talk that the brand has passed is testament to its continued relevance, said Michael McIntosh, the founder of Supreme Leaks News, a website and Instagram page for streetwear brands. That discussion, he pointed out, has been going on for at least a decade.
But as Supreme’s profile continues to grow, there will be a certain cohort that remembers his humbler, rebellious days. For them, the Fairfax store not only changed the character of a street, it also made it a central part of their lives.
Sage Elsesser, an artist and professional skateboarder once sponsored by Supreme, grew up in Los Angeles and remembered that at the back of the store there was a door frame to the warehouse where employees and friends of the brand would mark their heights as they getting older. When Mr. Jebbia was in town with his children, they also recorded their measurements.
‘I hadn’t thought about that for a long time,’ Mr Elsesser said. “I wonder if it’s still there.”