![]() to music, to art, to many things, and that allowed us to make things with an open mind.” Young people-and skaters-are very, very open-minded. “There are always critics that don’t understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion. “My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music,” Jebbia says. (The recent surfeit of off-duty models posting Instagrams of themselves lounging, living, and partying in Supreme has only added fuel to the fire.) ![]() Of course, what began as a generally male-focused enterprise has, with more and more frequency, been co-opted by women-mirroring both the rise of girl skaters and youth culture’s impressively genderless approach to dressing and living. Jebbia is, likewise, ever-mindful of his customer, who is generally aged eighteen to 25 and wants simply to buy cool stuff-and who will pay for it, assuming it’s worth it. His office a few blocks west of the Supreme store is adorned with a skateboard designed by Raymond Pettibon some drawings by Jebbia’s kids, age 8 and 10 and a larger-than-life-size portrait of James Brown-whom Jebbia, crucially, sees as not just the hardest-working man in showbiz but as a guy who never played down to his audience. “The shop that carries the cool stuff that everybody was wearing-no big brands or anything.” “The cool, cool shop,” says Jebbia, who is 54 and dressed in jeans and a plain dark-blue T-shirt, label-free and low-key, with closely cropped hair and deep blue eyes. Rex and Bowie on breaks and spending his spare cash on trips to London to buy clothes, it was always in a certain elusive kind of store-one that became the model for Supreme. When Jebbia was a teenager in Crawley, West Sussex, in the eighties, working at a Duracell factory, listening to T. James Jebbia, the man who, in 1994, founded and to this day runs the SoHo-based company that has been making clothing and skateboards and a lot of other things that the people who love it absolutely have to have, doesn’t think of Supreme the way most people in fashion might-as a brand that started out in a small store on Lafayette Street and has since inched its way to legendary global status. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |