A Marriage with the Street — The Day Luxury Came Down to the Sidewalk

Last time, we looked at Japan as a gold mine. We saw how the frenzy of the bubble era pushed luxury brands toward becoming ‘something everyone owns’, and how that heat eventually spread to Asia and to China. While taking pride in their high threshold, the brands quietly carried the question of how to win over a wider clientele.

Then, in the twenty-first century, luxury joined hands with an unexpected partner. Skateboarding, hip-hop, the street culture born of the pavement — a world once considered the polar opposite. Why did brands that had stood at the summit of formality come down to the street? In this chapter, we look at the era when luxury and the street were wed, examining both its light and its shadow.

The Day the Sanctum Met the Skater

In January 2017, an announcement at the men’s collection in Paris shook the fashion world. ‘Louis Vuitton’ unveiled a collaboration with ‘Supreme’, a street brand born in New York.

‘Supreme’ was a brand that emerged in the 1990s from skateboard culture. Its so-called box logo — white lettering set on a red box — enjoyed a cult following among young people, and was known for the long lines that formed with every new release. ‘Louis Vuitton’, meanwhile, as we traced in Episode 1 of this series, was a venerable house among venerable houses, founded in 1854 around travel trunks. A sanctum that honored formality and history teaming up with an upstart that had risen from the pavement — that pairing alone overturned the industry’s common sense.

Bags and garments layering the red box logo over the brown monogram ground were sold in limited fashion that summer, and long lines were reported at pop-ups around the world. Luxury brands had traditionally been said to avoid collaborations with streetwear, but this encounter between the two was praised as showing that even seemingly opposed brands could succeed commercially together.

This affair was far more than mere buzz-making. It powerfully impressed upon the entire industry the possibility that ‘lowering the threshold’, rather than cheapening a brand, could in fact draw in a new kind of frenzy.

Virgil Abloh, a Doorway

The figure who symbolized the marriage of street and luxury was Virgil Abloh.

With a background in studying architecture, he worked around music and art before launching his own brand, ‘Off-White’, in 2012. With designs featuring quotation marks and a method of presenting existing things slightly shifted, he won the support of the younger generation. Then in 2018, ‘Louis Vuitton’ appointed him as artistic director of menswear. Abloh was reported to have become the first person with African roots to lead the menswear division of this storied house, which counts more than a century since its founding. That June, his first collection unveiled in Paris was said to have drawn great attention along with its rainbow runway.

The storied house, clad in the sensibility of the street, suddenly drew closer to becoming ‘something of ours’ for the young. Not a brand their fathers and mothers had admired, but a brand their own generation could speak of — that way of closing the distance was the path to survival that the luxury of this era discovered.

The Logo Revived by Social Media

There was another force that moved this era. The smartphone, and social media.

As we traced in Episode 6, in the 1970s and 80s the flood of logos diluted brand value and drove storied houses into crisis. Out of that reckoning, from the 90s onward there was even a trend toward making logos more restrained. Yet in the 2010s, as photo-sharing social media spread, the situation reversed once again. Large logos and monograms recognizable at a glance stood out strongly on screen, and were reappraised as ‘photogenic’ symbols.

The marriage with the street, overlapping with this tailwind of social media, swelled into a great surge. Lines formed on the release day of a limited collaboration, the scene spread, and desire was stirred further still. Luxury, by lowering its threshold, could be said to have succeeded in staging a new kind of ‘out-of-reach’.

Beyond the Opened Door

Luxury that came down to the street did indeed gain new vitality. With the young generation, the vast emerging markets, and the megaphone of social media on its side, the industry swelled to an unprecedented scale.

And yet, questions remain here too. Admired by everyone, yet not easily within reach — that exquisite sense of distance was supposed to be what supported luxury’s value. Lowering the threshold to invite many in, and remaining special. These two are, by nature, at odds. The marriage with the street was a brilliant sleight of hand that momentarily resolved that tension, but once the trick of the magic is widely known, the spell may break.

Where will the brands that came down to the street head from here? And just what is it that we are paying that price for in the first place? In the next, final chapter, we shift our gaze from the present to the future, surveying the spot on which luxury now stands.