ON BEING ‘TOTALLY UNCOOL’: BARBARA KRUGER vs. SUPREME
BY LUCY POSNER
I was fourteen when I bought my first Supreme piece – a $25 bright green, ear warmer headband. It was winter, and although I’d bought the ear warmers with the intention of giving them to my brother for Christmas, I ended up wearing them way more than he ever did.
Even more embarrassing than my ninth grade self trekking through the snow to school in jeggings, camo Roshe Runs, and a shamrock colored Supreme headband, was the fact that I made my mom wait in line with me for thirty minutes outside the store before I bought it. That being said, I’m of the belief that forcing your mom to wait outside the Supreme store with you is something like a rite of passage for any emerging fuckboy. And I was certainly no exception.
In the six years since that fateful day, I’ve slowly but surely developed into a full blown drop-camping, re-selling, Grailed-obsessed Hypebeast. I cut far too many Thursday morning classes in high school just to go to the bathroom and get on the Supreme website in time for the latest drop. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent waiting in pop-up lines, trying to get Yeezy bots to work, or filing Grailed complaints against people sending me Diamond Supply T-shirts instead of Bape cargos. It’s fair to say more than half my teenage years were a huge waste of money and a massive waste of time – at least what my parents think – but when it comes to Hypebae-ing it 24/7, there’s definitely more than meets the eye.
I should start by saying that being a “girl who wears streetwear” is as equally legitimizing as it is frustrating. I’ve always found there’s a kind of power trip that goes along with – not just wearing – but pulling off clothes that seem almost exclusively made for egotistical, douchey fuckboys who like wasting their parents’ money. That said, I’ll be the first to fight the stigma, and admit that places like Palace, Bape, Supreme, and Stone Island make a lot of genuinely nice, fine, quality clothing. It always feels good to be slightly subversive, especially if you genuinely enjoy what you’re doing in the process. And in a small way, wearing ridiculously hyped clothes has allowed me to do just that.
But, like many things, the business of streetwear (and the fashion industry in general) has always been male-dominated. And has always been questionable. Whether we’re talking about Gosha Rubchinskiy’s recent pedophilia accusations, Karl Lagerfeld’s known hatred of plus-size women, or John Galliano’s blatant anti-semitism – those at the helm of fashion have always been problematic.
On the consumer side, things are not so different. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard rando fuckboys snidely comment on my outfits when they think I’m out of earshot. How many times I’ve been quizzed about all 33 Jordans, asked if I know who the guy on my bogo is, interrogated as to which designer was with what house before he started his personal line in what year. Stuff hypeboys with established clout would never ask their male counterparts. In the grand scheme of things, this is hardly a burden to have to bear. But the fact that women are rarely represented in the streetwear market only adds fuel to the fire. Ultimately, I’ve come to realize that when you’re “the girl who wears blank,” you’re always just “the girl who wears blank.” That is, of course, until you’re the girl who wears Supreme.
Supreme is kind of like the Kylie Jenner of streetwear – an unavoidable, overly-hyped, physical embodiment of American capitalism you love to hate, who also happens to steal everything she does from a woman twenty years older than her (*cough* Naomi Campbell *cough*). In this case, though, Naomi Campbell is the seventy-four year old, New Jersey born artist, Barbara Kruger. It probably takes about half a second to realize that everything that is Supreme is entirely an appropriation of Barbara Kruger’s over forty-year art career. The brand’s immediately recognizable ‘box logo’ – a red rectangular box with stark white writing – is pretty much identical to the graphic motif used in almost all of Kruger’s work.
It’s no surprise that Supreme – a brand with a reputation for releasing unlicensed “collaborations” via the appropriation of certain pop culture images (i.e. the CocaCola logo, Kate Moss’s photos, the L.A Kings font, Kermit the Frog, Picasso paintings, etc.) – blatantly stole Barbara Kruger’s whole spiel. What’s interesting, however, is that Kruger’s art stands for absolutely everything Supreme is not. Subversive, critical, and very anti-patriarchal, Supreme has essentially misappropriated Kruger’s work, taking what was supposed to be an incendiary anti-capitalist image, and turning it into one of (if not the) most recognizable labels we know today.
On top of this, Supreme uses what Kruger originally intended as a pro-women emblem to reinforce much of the misogynistic ideology behind the brand. With few exceptions – Cindy Sherman (who designed skate decks for the brand) and Rei Kawakubo (the head of Comme des Garçons) who has worked with the brand in the past – Supreme almost exclusively collaborates with men, many of whom have garnered pretty bad reputations surrounding their treatment of women. An obvious example is the infamous photographer Terry Richardson, who shot a calendar for the brand in 2003.
Supreme doesn’t use women models. They’ve never released a female-targeted item. In all years I’ve visited their stores, I’ve never seen a woman working on the floor or behind the register. On the rare occasion that a woman is featured in any aspect of the brand at all, she is seen exclusively as a sex-object. The Kate Moss bogo, Supreme’s most successful “collaboration” of all time, shows the model in her underwear with the red box-logo strewn across her crotch – simultaneously censoring and commodifying her. More recently, Supreme collaborated with hentai artist Toshio Maeda. Together they released everything from pillows to T-shirts. All with images of anime girls not just undressed, but noticeably in shame.
This, of course, does nothing to stop the brand from appealing to women and non binary consumers. In spite of the invaluable publicity female celebrities and influencers have generated, Supreme seems to completely ignore any, if not all, of the many parts women have played in its tremendous success.
James Jebbia, who founded Supreme in 1994 (he also founded Stussy three years earlier), has been recognized for years among both plaintiffs and socially-conscious consumers for refusing to acknowledge neither Barbara Kruger’s influence on his band, nor his flagrant misogyny.
Kruger, on the other hand, seems like she literally could not care less. In 2013, Supreme sued the clothing brand Married to the Mob for infringing on its red-and-white Futura logo. When Complex asked Kruger to comment on the lawsuit, she responded with a blank email including an attachment which read, “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers. I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement!”
However, in a more obvious retort to the brand, Kruger held a live performance in New York City as part of her work for the Performa Biennial. In November 2017, a recurring event, called “Untitled (The Drop),” opened outside what was once the former American Apparel store in SoHo. Security guards were hired to manage the crowd. The line swept all the way around the block. Once inside, performance participants sold beanies, hats, and even skateboards. All reading things like, “Want it buy it forget it,” and “Whose hopes? Whose fears? Whose values? Whose justice?,” just to name a few.
Supreme stands out in its particularly poor treatment of women and creatives alike – but labels that commodify, exclude, and appropriate are not exceptions in the world of streetwear. Everyone from Marc Jacobs, to Nike, to Gucci, to Gosha have been accused of exploiting certain groups in certain ways. Unethically consuming almost any kind of fashion is essentially unavoidable. But, where do we draw the line?
I’ve spent a good six years trying to answer that question – and much to no avail. I hid all three of my Gosha sweatpants so I wouldn’t be tempted to wear them after news of Rubchinskiy’s recent pedophilia accusations broke. I stopped wearing my Gucci belt after the brand’s blackface sweater controversy. I won’t buy any Karl Lagerfeld or John Galliano. But, for whatever reason, I just can’t stop wearing Supreme. And I guess that’s just the point. At the end of the day, I suppose the hype has just kept me captive. It pains me to admit, but I love my bogos. I love my bright red puffer. And I love my embarrassingly large assortment of quirky stickers.
In all the time I’ve tried to combat my wildly anti-feminist, patriarchal-capitalist affirming, unabashed hypocrisy I’m consistently reminded of a lecture on Kanye West that Yale professor Kathryn Lofton gave at Vassar back in October. In a similar wave of consumer guilt, I asked her why – in spite all my self-proclaimed feminism – I can’t stop listening to songs about fucking bitches, abusing women, and forcing strippers to suck dick. An avid fan of women-hating rap herself, Lofton told me that, sometimes, it’s just really hard to stop patronizing the things we know are problematic but can’t help but love. Ultimately it’s not our job to stop Kanye West from supporting Trump. To talk Trippie Redd into not rapping about assaulting women. Or – in my case – change the entire institutional system that’s lead to the creation and success of the most iconic streetwear brand to date. All we can hope is that, in some small aspect of our hype-quests, we can take back a piece of the power we’ve lost.