The Surprising Origins of Streetwear

Let's talk about how hip hop and skaters took over global fashion.

There's a reason you wore a printed graphic tee and a pair of Adidas to work today.

In the '90s, hip hop and skater fashion fused to create the couture phenomenon, street wear.

Hip hop has always been deeply rooted in the identities, expressions, and rebellion of young Black and Brown communities.

Skater culture represented the angst, rebellion, and punk rock spirit of working class and suburban youth.

How did these two communities come together to change the way we dress?

Hoodies, graphic tees, sneakers, casual, comfortable clothes accentuated with designer brands.

These are just some of the pieces that make up street wear.

Influenced by youth subcultures of the '80s and '90s, street wear brands like Supreme and Stussy grew into a multi-billion-dollar industry used in everyday gear and high fashion.

I think we're in an era where high fashion is what a lot of people are wearing, but I think even the highest people in high fashion would admit that high fashion today is an adaptation of street wear.

I sat down with Chris Gibbs, fashion tastemaker and owner of the famed LA street wear boutique, Union.

Raised both as a skater punk in the suburbs of Ottawa, Canada and a hip hop head in the New York underground scene, Chris infused his unique perspective during street wear's infancy to establish some of its most iconic looks and styles.

Most recognizably, Union's Air Jordan sneaker collabs.

Originally, Union was founded in New York by Supreme founder, James Jebbia.

Chris worked his way up the ranks, going from folding t-shirts in the '90s to managing the boutique when it moved to LA to eventually buying the store.

He helped make Union a home for up-and-coming designers and brands.

We try and do classics, but with a twist.

That twist can come in a lot of different ways.

This is your classic officer shirt wool button-downs, but we've lined it, which is something that's unique.

How did high fashion view urban fashion?

We find ourselves in an interesting point in time for street wear, which is it's becoming the status quo.

Early on, high fashion looked down on urban and street wear very much so.

There were, I think, racial reasons why we weren't being accepted at the beginning, and those walls still exist.

I think that's not a coincidence.

The foundation of street wear and urban, independently and collectively, is in marginalized communities.

Taking a step further, I don't think that urban or street wear in particular exists without hip hop.

Hip hop is their main vehicle.

Hip hop artists and communities use style as a way to express who they are and who they want to be.

In the late '70s and early '80s, mainstream fashion was dominated by designer brands who determined the look and styles of popular attire, but hip hop, as it was breaking through, flipped the script.

Young Black and Latinx communities steeped in the New York hip hop scene combined and repurposed baggy clothes, athletic casual wear, and luxury brands to create their own style.

I was in Brooklyn, New York, which was the best kept secret in the '80s.

I was going to Canal and buying a Gucci t-shirt, getting bucket hats, like the leather bucket hats, and the leather African medallions and stuff like that.

This fusion of attire was the ethos of hip hop, constantly adopting and remixing art to create something new and fresh.

Artists incorporated black leather jackets, African-inspired patterns, tracksuits, oversized tees, jeans, and sneakers, and rocked them with luxury statement pieces like gold jewelry.

Women artists incorporated traditional men's attire into a feminine style, creating their own way of expressing their art and music.

This continuous innovation made hip hop the new standard of cool and brought its signature looks to young urban and suburban communities around the world.

In the mid-90s, there was still an incredible subculture of underground hip hop that's still thriving, but hip hop moved from subculture, even counterculture, to pop culture.

That really shaped, I would just say, the overarching understanding and direction of fashion, especially fashion for Black and Brown people.

At the same time, there was another subculture, counterculture, damn near on parallel tracks, also going through that same metamorphosis, which was skate culture.

Skateboarding had been an American pastime since the 1950s, but in the 1970s and '80s, California teens developed a new style of skateboarding that used public spaces and empty pools as the training grounds for new moves and tricks.

Associated with deviance, anarchy, and rebellion, skateboarding became the calling card of the punk and metal scenes.

Long hair, surfer brand T-shirts, shredded jeans, and a pair of Converse high tops.

As the decades went on, skate's counter-cultural imagery and spirit spread across the world with the advent of homemade VHS tapes.

Skaters emerged as stars like Tony Hawk, while skate shops expanded across the country to serve this new audience.

With this explosion of skater popularity, as we saw with hip hop, young people across different regions developed their own interpretation of skater culture.

In California, some skaters became hip hop acts, like Skatemaster Tate and The Concrete Crew.

On the East Coast, punk venues like The Roxy hosted hip hop acts, while taggers across both cultures took it to the subways.

Skaters like Stevie Williams and Harold Hunter and skate teams like Zoo York and Menace represented the intersection of hip hop and skate culture.

When I first moved to New York, I found myself right smack dab in the middle of that culture.

I was able to see where Harold Hunter was positioned in that culture, which was a Black kid from downtown New York who was both into hip hop and skate culture.

You know what I mean.

Kids came out around that time, and it definitely reflected what was happening on the street level.

You have these two very almost opposing cultures from their genesis now coming together and finding common ground because the rest of society is pushing against them.

Hip hop and skate coming together also allowed a lot of folks in hip hop new spaces to self-define themselves in ways that hip hop was becoming a bit more rigid in terms of like there was a certain kind of hip-hop look or hip-hop pose, and skate freed it.

This led to a fashion exchange between hip hop heads and skaters.

Skaters adopted hip hop's large tees, baggy denim jeans, thick sneakers, and flat bill hats for both style and function.

Hip hop's fascination with luxury logos, branded sportswear, and workwear turned these brands into staples of streetwear.

Brands and stores emerged to serve this new audience.

At the same time, hip hop labels and entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to create their own brands.

Even countries like Japan, France, and the UK got into the game.

By the end of the '90s and early 2000s, streetwear grew beyond its underground roots into a mass-consumed and highly marketed industry.

There was also a version of this where urban culture got a little whitewashed through the suburban influence of skate culture and either allowed for or fostered or devolved, I don't know, something that was for us, by us to be now diluted, but expanded.

There's good and bad.

For decades, high fashion brands repackaged and benefited from hip hop and streetwear without bringing in the artists and creators behind the look.

By the 2010s, the industry restructured to market and reach a younger consumer base.

They brought in designers like Virgil Abloh and artists like Pharrell Williams and Rihanna to develop their own luxury fashion lines.

Everybody is really looking forward to see your first collection for Louis Vuitton.

How do you handle the pressure?

I don't know.

Pressure makes diamonds, it makes great things, so I embrace the pressure.

You look at somebody like Virgil's career, and you see a Black African American creative director of one of the top French fashion houses in Louis Vuitton, and you understand those walls and those institutions are starting to break down.

It also, on a parallel track, shifted the ownership of streetwear and the agency from something that was independent and through that lens, often Black and Brown, owned and operated, to now it's LVMH.

It's owned by the man, so to speak.

When I think about streetwear, I always associate it not simply being with one specific racial group, but with a multi-racial, multi-class formation of primarily a lot of young people who see your brand as representing how they move through urban spaces, and not even just urban spaces.

It's been able to resonate with folks far beyond just metropolitan cities.

I think the foundation of streetwear is a rebellion, explicit, a rebellion against the status quo, and so, by default, it's always been community oriented.

I think what Union has always tried to do is give agency and appreciation to the foundation.

Today, the line between streetwear and mainstream fashion has nearly disappeared.

Hoodies, sneakers, and graphic tees have become our everyday attire.

What's next for the style that was originally a symbol for young rebellion and freedom?

I think we're at the beginning of a new generation of streetwear, the next evolution of what it's going to become.

Coming into things, streetwear was largely a place for people who didn't have access to fashion to start to experiment with fashion.

There were still a lot of limitations on what one could wear and how one could express themselves.

I think those are gone.

I think it's a beautiful thing.

You can find street wear everywhere, from the runway to your closet.

It's not just because it's in this season.

It's because communities of young people came together and redefined what's cool.

Hope you liked this episode of Outside the Lyrics, where we're looking at hip hop's impact with the folks who helped shape its culture.

Make sure to check out our next episode, where we're digging into the origins of krump, right here on PBS Voices.