An Ode to 2016: A Special Moment in Streetwear and Men's Fashion
You'll never know what you had until it's gone.
You're sweating, rushing, weaving through the bodies in the humid BART station. You're normally against the clock in the morning in an attempt to avoid an uncomfortable confrontation with your boss or to duck a coworker you spotted on your train car, but today is different. It's 7:50 AM on a Thursday in September and you need to get to your desk before the Supreme x TNF drop in ten minutes. The Nuptse is printed in a real tree pattern, which is trending. The other color is orange, matching your collection of San Francisco Giants snapbacks and fitted hats. You're unsure if you'd keep the real tree jacket or if you'd throw it up on Grailed. It's $400 retail, but you can easily flip that for upwards of $750 if you post it on the marketplace quickly enough - there will be a poor soul who cannot picture his life without it and rush to give you nearly a thousand dollars for it.
The weather is crisp and warm as early Autumn usually is in the Bay Area. The Financial District smells of black coffee and croissants. Your nose perks up. You'd love one, but there's no time to stop. You check your Apple Watch Series 2, 7:53. You pick up the pace - a light jog if you will. Good thing you decided to wear a pair of Adidas Ultra Boosts this morning. You're a couple of blocks away down Montgomery St and before you know it, you're entering the elevator.
On the 11th floor, your coworkers are funneling in little by little, drinking the free coffee, picking at the snack selection. You should be making sales calls starting at 8 AM sharp, but fuck that. You're a 22-year-old new college graduate, you're making less than a $40,000 base salary and you know that you're inside sales job is doomed. Another glance at your Apple Watch. 7:59 AM.
You know the motions. You've been here a million times before. You load up the Supreme home screen and toggle to the "new" products page and begin refreshing.
8:00 AM hits.
Refresh.
White screen.
Your stomach sinks. Refresh again.
Another white screen. It cannot be happening again.
One more refresh. Items appear.
You hover over the real tree TNF Nuptse and it reads "sold out," so you move over to the orange variation and click in. Luckily your size is still available, so you add it to your cart. When you click through to the checkout page, the rainbow wheel appears. You don't know how many others are trying to cart this jacket. Then again, you also don't know how much stock there is. Finally, you get through and you autofill your address. It's happening. You're so close you can smell it. You click the mouse, which is hovering over the "complete order" button. The jacket is yours, you think to yourself as the page loads. You look down and close your eyes and imagine the outfits you'll get to pull off in your new, cozy jacket (that is admittingly too thick for the mild Bay Area environment). Then you look up and instead of seeing an order confirmation screen, you see that your credit card had been declined. In a moment of panic, you click around the page, then click back into the product, which is now sold out. You audibly groan and your coworkers look over. It's nothing new. You've done this before; you'll do it again. The rest of the day is spent lackadaisically making calls, trying to sell your stupid service to business owners who don't want to talk to you. You sulk in between calls. At lunch, you scroll Twitter and see fit pics of friends across the country in New York or down in Los Angeles who were able to pick up the Nuptse in person.
No Restocks notifications hit for the rest of the day about possible Nuptse inventory making its way back to the website. If you don't want to pay the exorbitant resell prices, the game is over.
After work, you hit the gym. Tomorrow is Friday, and you have happy hour plans with your friends and their coworkers. You'll get drunk on discounted cocktails before hitting a Spanish restaurant that you have a reservation, followed by a night of bar hopping. You go to sleep hopeful.
On Friday rumors of a Kanye West drop in cities around the world pop up on Twitter. You start checking the KanyeToThe forums for any info, but all you can find are screenshots of the same rumors you saw on Twitter. People are speculating whether or not there will be one drop or multiple drops in a handful of cities. You, your brother, and your boys are texting one another to game plan a possible release in the city.
Productivity at work is sparse -- it is a Friday after all. You're mostly sitting around, twiddling your thumbs in anticipation of the new Yeezy merch. Surely we'll get a pop-up location here in the city you think to yourself as the seconds tick away and you inch closer to the weekend. Then a Tweet pops up from someone on the inside. It's a list of all the cities that will have a drop, and San Francisco is on the list.
You rush to check Yeezy Supply and there it is, the list of cities that will host pop-up shops as well as the location of each store. Your location is deep in Chinatown, on a street that you've never heard of. You're working in the Financial District, so it'll only be roughly a 10-minute walk.
A business decision must be made. While your office may be close to the location, the fact that the address has been announced will bring hundreds of hypebeasts to Chinatown. Is it worth the risk of showing up at 5:15 and being so far in the back of the line that you won't have a shot at your pieces?
There's no other option. You feign illness and ask to be allowed to go home. It's a warm afternoon and the air feels a bit crispier now that you're free for the weekend from a job that you hate. Your friends are also on their way to the pop-up, and you'll all be together soon.
When you arrive there's easily 100 people in front of you in line. Lots of slim jeans and Ultraboost sneakers, a few pairs of Vans. Every now and then a kid Supreme box logo gets in line behind you. There's Fear of God x Vans and Off-White Jordan 1's. You're marooned in a sea of hype clothing - archive Supreme being visible from down the street. You take great pleasure in seeing items in real life that you’d previously only seen online.
You chop it up with the boys in front and back of you. You get to know them and find out where they’re from, what clothing items they want to buy, what they do for a living. By the time the line moves you feel like you really know each other and before you know it you’re the next group to go into the store. You don’t know it now, but you’ll run into these guys again at the Saint Pablo tour in a month. You will both remember each other stop and chat for a few minutes and even grab a drink together before the show starts.
Inside is bare, mostly white with one clothing rack, full of items that you can look at - they’re only samples but you’re allowed to feel them. The store has been playing blonde by Frank Ocean, like everywhere else at that time. A store associate brings you a card and it has the images of all of the items available for sale. The San Francisco specific merch is orange and white like the Giants. You decide to pick out a t-shirt and a hoodie and the associate probably bring that out. The whole ordeal probably takes about two minutes and before you know it, you’re scanning your credit card on the store Square card reader and you’re back on the street.
You rush back to the BART station with your bag. Trying not to get noticed, you wouldn’t want anyone, knowing that you just got this rare merch. Even though it’s Friday, and you’d love to go out to the bars and drink and be merry and sing songs until your voice gives out, you’ve been waiting in line for a few hours and you just want to rest you go to sleep feeling the sense of accomplishment that you were able to get something that you want it today. You tell your friends that you had happy hour plans with that you're not going to make it. The next morning you feel like you were there by watching their Instagram stories.
It's been two days of being clothing obsessed. You and your brother decide that you wanna take it kind of easy today and not be in the rat race to see who can cop the hottest piece of clothing, but you still find yourself going downtown to grab a bite or maybe some coffee. While you’re down there, you may as well go to Barney’s.
You’re wearing a hoodie that you just purchased yesterday- the orange one with song lyrics printed on the back. Your brother wears slim jeans with Vans and a long t-shirt that says Kith across the front but in Bape camouflage styling. You notice as you’re making your way downtown that guys are looking at your clothes and giving subtle nod of approval.
Even though Barneys has clothing that ranges into thousands of dollars and you’re wearing clothing that’s only worth a couple of hundred, you’re still welcome to the shop with open arms. The security guard smiles and says welcome back and you ask him how he’s doing lately. The top floor is full of bags and wallets, small leather goods that come at high prices. You try on a shoulder bag by Fendi, knowing damn well you’re not going to buy it, but it feels nice to look at on your body. You make your way down the cylinder staircase to where the clothing and the shoes are. Barneys is always bustling no matter what time of day it is, the usual store associates are working these hours.
Behind the Advisory Board Crystals, and next to the Fear of God, you see Miles, the six foot four inches, thin, bald clothing enthusiast who helped you with a couple of purchases a few months ago. You to follow each other on Instagram and comment on each others’ posts. He is in a phase where he wears a lot of Margiela and vetements, You’re wearing a lot of the latest Supreme and Gosha, whatever you can get your hands on. They’ll both of your styles are very different. You can both appreciate what you’re trying to do. He shows you this Vetements hoodie in blood red with the saying “May the bridges you burn light the way,” across the front. You’ll continue to think about that hoodie every day for the rest of your life.
Miles says that they’re getting the new Undercover season in store soon. There are a lot of Stanley Kubrick references in the slightest collection by Jun Takahashi, which works great for you because A Clockwork Orange is one of your favorite films of all time. You chat about John Elliot and the latest colors of the Villain hoodie. Miles helped you purchase your black Villain hoodie a few months ago. In the midst of all you’re bullshitting, Miles says something to you that will stick with you for the rest of your life.
“ I’ve always liked you guys because clothing makes you excited. And I’ll get excited about clothing and when me and you talk about clothes we’re just excited together and that’s really what the shit is about.”
Do you leave the store without buying anything but he says hello to two other guys that you know working in the store on your way out? As you’re leaving Barneys, you can’t help but try on a Bottega Venetta leather woven bracelet. One day you’re going to come back for it, even though it’s $300.
A couple of years later there will be a Louis Vuitton x Supreme collaboration, the best of both worlds coming together to bring us one of the most unattainable collections ever. Palace x Polo Ralph Lauren will soon follow. Much later Gucci and Balenciaga will team up.
Kanye will have meltdown after meltdown, tanking the social stock of Yeezys and Yeezy Season. His collaborations with Gap and Adidas will abruptly end and the party is over.
Menswear personalities will go on a crusade against logos, Supreme, sneakers, and anything that we cherished during those unsuspecting years. We won't let their misery, lack of nuance, and contrarianism crush our spirits. Influencer culture is a toxin to clothing. Just a bunch of dorky guys trying to step on whatever is cool to get to the next thing.
You look back on those days and think to yourself that we really had it all. We had ourselves a community. Passed are the days when you could comfortably line up for clothing and not feel judged for it. Maybe that’s just a game for the younger kids now, but it does not feel like we have the same community around us that we used to.
Barneys is long gone and what is replaced it in San Francisco is just a Saks fifth Avenue and a Neiman Marcus; both of which you get the uncomfortable feeling from the store employees that if you’re not going to buy something you’re not welcome. There are smaller, more specialized shops, but there was only one Mecca.
It’s easy to look back at that time and realize that we lost so much of that community. Not being able to get your items on Supreme, lining up for sneakers, chatting about it up with the store associates – at all just felt right. It was all part of the game. Looking back were some of the clothes ugly? Sure, maybe some of them were but who’s to say we’re not going to look back at what we’re wearing now and not cringe? There was a lot of heat that came out back then too that I still wear to this day. I just can’t think of another time when clothing really brought together a subculture of people the way that it did during that era and I’ll always be grateful to have lived through it.
And if you ever want a reminder of how insane that era really was just look up “Ape versus Racks" on YouTube (you just had to be there). Truly a blessed time for all.
Peace and love