Cherry Picking in the Archive
Undercover x Supreme Stratagems, Discourses on Discourses
There is a cliche to writing about Supreme. As the scapegoat, the instigator, and the powerhouse of streetwear, checking in on the brand and its relation to all cool becomes a roundabout way of feeling the pulse of menswear. This week Highsnobiety declared in a common statement of sly non-opinion that Supreme is Dead, Long Live Supreme. In streetwear discourses, this has become the equivalent of clickbait.
Supreme is an effective subject because it once represented such total authenticity in street and skate wear, the uniform of subcultural groups in New York and Los Angeles. It also became inextricable from symptoms of this world’s new success like reselling, gauche branding, and the excess of collaboration. Their cash-in on the momentous cultural recognition they gained, the quick filling in of increasingly specific “streetwear” niches, and ultimately the purchasing of the company by VF Corporation caused Supreme to lose some of the credibility and desirability they had accrued. Supreme did not initially meet the expectations VF had for the brand, and many wondered if the brand was on the path of Bape: purchased by a definitive uncool corporate power, stripped of major visionaries in creative roles, and interested in formulaic reconfigurations of past designs.
The pivot that turns the story of Supreme from one of a bursting bubble to that of a reforming institution is the hiring of Tremaine Emory of Denim Tears fame for creative director. Supreme was a brand based on specific creative experiences and vision - those who held the role throughout the 2000s to 2010s proved successful in translating their skills into new ventures into niches of New York streetwear who ended up competing with Supreme’s broad strokes. Emory provided an essential new soul, center, and focus for Supreme with improved focus on denim and outerwear (the categories that make Stussy such a current draw).
Like many brands fighting to stand out in an oversaturated market, Supreme falls back on its past - a strategy that seems particularly clear with its collaborators. Highsnobiety’s bold declaration of death and non-death come on the heels of one of Supreme’s most knotty and diffuse collaborations of late: the fourth installment of Undercover x Supreme. The first of these collaborations came in 2015 at a significant height of Supreme’s acclaim and the beginning of Undercover’s comeback. It made sense - mapping Supreme’s localized form of rebellion and style onto Jun Takahashi’s more luxurious garments and complex branding styles and slogans. Both brands grew up around similar labels and simultaneous streetwear renaissance. This marriage crystalized into moments in fashion like the duo’s work with Public Enemy in 2018 which initiated real discourse and set a new standard of inventiveness in streetwear collaboration and storytelling. Five years since that collection came Undercover x Supreme 2023.
One could easily see these images and check off the hallmarks of each brand. The high/low mixture of bejeweled military garbs, spray paint tees with mini branding, references to Anime, and grunge-styled denim. However, this collaboration also reveals a now oft-repeated trend and strategy of Supreme with its high-profile collaborators: digging into the fashion archive.
This has spawned a whole new genre of menswear writing on Supreme in which fashion archivists excavate the references, discreet and indiscreet, that permeate new collections. The unification of these references is usually commercial and convenient. For Supreme x Junya Watanabe, collections from 2002, 2003, and 2006, with Jean Paul Gaultier they incorporate a 1997 collection, and with Yohji Yamamoto they reference 90’s ad campaigns and floral motifs. In contrast, Supreme’s recurring work with Comme Des Garcons almost never referenced archive work. The difference is that pieces from old collections are desired, expensive, and rare, yet their images permeate mood boards and resell sites. These reconstructed collaborations give these designs new lives and contexts but also serve as explicit cash grabs and devaluations of old influence.
Archive Fashion site Archivepdf created a comprehensive list of Supreme’s sources, and it is perhaps the most varied of their references. Author of the article Founder of the site and author @riv.ig cites “AW01 ‘D.A.V.F.’ military garments adorned with jewelry, SS00 ‘Teaser’ in collaboration with artists KAWS, Futura, Stash and Sk8thing, Undercover’s Paris debut collection SS03 ‘Scab’ featuring graphic designs from Sedition’s Earthbeat LP.” What unifies this vast breadth of aesthetics, eras, and garments could be the mixture of military garments, cut-and-sew reconstruction, and bold graphic qualities. One could also point to the fact that outerwear from AW02 sells on resale sites for thousands, that one-off tees are some of Undercover’s most expensive, and that their work with Futura are some of the rarest pieces of Undercover history.
What are the after-effects of the reference? Is this collaboration about uncovering history, and does that uncovering serve as a devaluing of what is individual and special, what is singularly unique about this past era? Does a collaboration like this one conjoin unlike parts of a career, eliminating the “unmarketable“ into a greatest hits collection of little to no nuance? Is the storytelling that was so essential to Supreme’s collaborative work and Takahashi’s current work reduced through this collection to one of financial success through formal techniques and references that can be reproduced at will? What are the full contexts of these pieces that Supreme is inadvertently implicating themselves in?
Undercover’s Spring Summer 2003 “Scab“ collection is perhaps his most famous - an aesthetic mix of crust punk and what most publications called “ethnic“ fabrics and patterns. The ending of the show was a set of looks resembling multicolored Burqas, leading some critics to assume the collection was about the fallout of 9/11. Regardless, the Burqas are a clear case of cultural appropriation, of a time before this discourse was popularized, and of deeply questionable ethics. Compare this statement to Undercover Autumn Winter 2001 show DAVF (Decorated Armed Military Forces), which proclaimed its antiwar statement with reconstructed military garb, aestheticized Arabic text, toonified guerillas with lashes and pearls, real and fake jewelry combined or embedded in garments, and ammunition crafted in crystal. Embedded in some of these references are profoundly disturbing, dated images and appropriations - how much can they be separated from individual garments?
Just as streetwear dialogues return to Supreme to discuss excess, legitimacy, and changing styles, archive fashion discourses often circle issues of appropriation as a means of trying to uncover the inauthentic and unpack the ethics of different kinds of “influence“. The difference between these two discourses is that conversations about appropriation in archive fashion usually remain clickbait - they illustrate fundamental obstinance in reckoning with problematic corners of the archive.
In the latest Supreme x Undercover collection, we are given the supposedly “ethnic“ patterns from Scab, the bejeweled military garbs from DAVF, and aestheticized Arabic from DAVF and 2009. The questions regarding ethical and unethical appropriation and the nuances of anti-war and anti-imperialist statement making between these collections are what make them worth engaging with. Reckoning with the lines Takahashi crosses, the statements and aesthetics that are still powerful today, and the conversations these runway shows start fully respects and considers Takahashi’s experiment. Supreme has left us with poorly hidden aesthetic shells devoid of meaningful conversation, strung together with an emphasis on formal construction. These separate aesthetic difficulties are masked in their bricolage, branded heavily in an effort to camouflage discourse. What the implications are of raising the cultural capital and visibility of work which, outside of its context, can glorify as much as it criticizes? What do we avoid in eliminating the space to deconstruct and debate Takahashi’s work, and the modern reaction to archive appropriation?
I write this piece weeks away from completing my thesis project. I devote a chapter to Undercover, specifically AW09 entitled “Neoboys and Poptonez“. There are few runway images available of this collection, records of what exactly was sold from it are equally diffuse, and I could find little to no criticism about the collection. This was fine - I focus on a pair of denim jeans popular in archive fashion that features the poem “Neoboy“ by Patti Smith embroidered on the pockets. Diving deep into this obscured corner of the archive, I quickly discovered that the text Takahashi uses for the pair (which is featured on other garments sold for AW09) features significantly different text from the poem Smith publishes in Babel.
In one sense, these edits are completely logistical. If the goal of the text is to communicate an appreciation of Smith’s artistry and identity, including these charged racial identifying distracts from these issues and starts charged conversations that Smith nor Takahashi are interested in. One may argue that to change this text is to dilute the original, equivalent to those who cull classic texts of modern “problematic details“. The difference here is that Takahashi and Smith collaborate on this collection together, and make a conscious decision to focus on “neoboy’s“ exploration of identity rather than a Beat vulgarity inherited from a Ginsberg obsession. Takahashi’s collaborative eye involves a recreation of “neoboy” as a more concise piece for his purposes that retains original power while refusing to needlessly reproduce harmful text and imagery. Through a more conscious and collaborative reconstruction of the poem from the ground up, contextualized with new garments and graphics, Takahashi is able to respect “neoboy“ as a source and Smith as an author without reproducing harmful material.
You can buy and access a multitude of pieces from DAVF, Scab, and Witches Cell Division, some of which contain complex and ethically ambiguous imagery and details, some of which may be more “innocent“ or innocuous. The oddness of Supreme’s recreation is to, in a nearly three decade career featuring years of popular military wear, formal deconstruction, and political statement making, choose collections that feature problematic aspects more significant to their whole. Moreover, some of these problematic details are replicated almost exactly and without context, bringing the mistakes of the past into a more unforgiving future. This occurred for seemingly no reason other than the idea that these works could be more commercially viable than other less problematic work.
Many wondered why another Japanese Avant-fashion prodigy Junya Watanabe worked with Supreme. Now, people question Watanabe’s Broad-gift shop style Spring/Summer range currently available, with its flashy Warhol Blazers and multi-hundred dollar Netflix hats. A few months ago fans wondered why Watanabe was working with Palace to make outerwear, and why Watanabe had constructed odd and wonderful Oakley sneakers. The answer in each of these cases seems to me to be a calling out to a new audience. Watanabe has graphic prowess and wants to contextualize his work in a way younger, more mainstream audiences will understand and appreciate. He wants new fans of Brain Dead’s sci-fi Oakleys and Palace’s branded jackets that he was doing both first, and still going strong. For designers more reliant on commercially successful collections to keep creating at the same level, this sort of commercial focus can be essential.
This is to say, pandering is not always intrinsically a soul-sucking, soul-selling act. To pander for Watanabe is not to create product that is cheap, unstoried, or devoid of context. Working to speak to a new market and context becomes an experiment as intense and interesting as a study of British tailoring or Japanese artisans. Takahashi’s work is, if anything, more commercially diverse than Watanabe’s which comes through in his brilliant initial work with Supreme. To them, and to Watanabe, collaboration is a generative and alchemical act. It creates, it does not merely gesture. In creating something true to the audiences of both combined worlds people are exposed to new ways of thinking, seeing, and wearing. Collaboration challenges the identity of both parties.
Supreme x Undercover’s 2023 collection is a disservice. It focuses on a static past and is even odd enough to reproduce some of the few specifically harmful motifs and corners of Takahashi’s work. Who is this collaboration for? Those who already know both parties? Those who will learn of Undercover through its least appropriate contexts? Those who only care for surfaces and logos? It is not enough to say this work is not generative, the best I can say of it is it picks the scab of neglected debates of appropriation and reminds old fans of both brands that standards must be set.
When you dive into the archive blind and with only money in mind, who knows what you may emerge with?