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Through videocam footage shot more than three decades ago, Empire Skate, the latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, which airs on the network on June 30, captures a moment in time: a collection of New York City skateboard kids working at, and hanging around, the original Manhattan retail outlet of the influential streetwear brand Supreme. They were an irreverent bunch, seen drinking beer and rolling dice in the back room where only cool members of a skateboard crew were allowed to congregate. Clouds of smoke were not uncommon. “It was like Cheech and Chong back there,” says Steven Cales, one of those emerging pro skateboarders, in Empire Skate.
Many customers at that first Supreme store didn’t receive service with a smile. “What is incredible about Supreme, even from its earliest days, is how menacingly New York it was,” says Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian in the film. Shoppers who didn’t fit in could expect a rude greeting. “Those kids could be really abusive to you,” notes another of the film’s commentators.
“I was an asshole,” says the original Supreme store manager, the mononymous skateboarder known as Chappy, in Empire Skate.
This was the origin of a multibillion-dollar business and one of the most consequential fashion brands in the world?
That’s the crux of the case made by Empire Skate, which traces the global influence of the gritty New York City skateboarding scene that emerged in the early- to-mid-‘90s. (TIME Studios is an executive producer on the film.)
“It’s one of the great American fashion brands, right up there with Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein,” Tashjian tells TIME. “I would say it's the most important fashion brand of the 21st century, maybe even internationally. Tom Ford might give me a call and have something to say about that. But I think it's accurate. It changed the way that people think about status and consumerism.”
And it all started with the skateboarders. In Empire Skate, Tony Hawk points to 1991 as a low point for skateboarding. “Vert” skateboarding in half-pipes in California, the birthplace of skate, had fallen out of favor. But around 1993, skateboarding began to take off in New York City; the New Yorkers proffered a more spontaneous style, as they treated the city’s garbage cans, stairs, rails, and building walls as their own personal playground. If they happened to irritate security guards and pedestrians, that was all part of the fun. ”What was so important,” says skateboard legend Rodney Mullen in the film, “and I think shapes the world of today of skateboarding more than almost anything else, is what was going on on the East Coast, especially coming out of New York City.”
“In New York it went underground,” says Tony Alva, who like Hawk and Mullen is an iconic figure in the sport. “But at the same time, they’re actually reseeding and revitalizing skateboarding.”
Enter James Jebbia. A designer and entrepreneur, Jebbia admired the style of these early-’90s skaters. “They would wear cool sh-t; they wouldn't wear skate clothes,” Jebbia told GQ in written correspondence in 2019. “It would be Polo, it would be a Gucci belt, it would be Champion.” (Jebbia, who rarely conducts interviews, does not appear in the documentary; he declined to be interviewed for this article.) The budding skate scene needed a shop to serve the community, so Jebbia founded Supreme in 1994, opening the flagship outlet on Lafayette Street downtown. Supreme sold colorful skate decks as well as T-shirts and other items with the now-familiar logo, a red-block rectangle that said “Supreme,” in white font, within the lines. While chaos often unfolded on the sidewalk outside the store and in the back room, Jebbia demanded a gleaming showroom floor, with neatly folded T-shirts and colorful skate decks hanging on display. The setup felt unusual for a skate shop, which was typically cluttered with stuff.
Supreme both catered to the tastes of the local skateboarders and called on them to market the brand’s authenticity to the rest of the world. While Jebbia didn’t skate himself, he scouted up-and-coming talent: in Empire Skate, Cales says he was told Jebbia would sit in a diner and watch him skate across the street. Many of the young skaters who gravitated toward the Supreme shop appeared in the controversial 1995 NC-17 movie Kids, directed by Larry Clark, which included graphic dialogue about underage sex and a scene depicting sexual assault. Justin Pierce, a Supreme brand ambassador, co-starred in the movie, while other Supreme skaters played extras or had smaller roles. (Pierce died by suicide, in 2000, at the age of 25.) The film, which grossed $20.4 million at the box office on a $1.5 million budget, helped give the Supreme skaters a sort of It factor. They’d get into the hottest New York City clubs and parties and stamp Supreme stickers on lampposts all over the city. They were analog influencers.
Supreme took off from there. The company became known for their Thursday product drops, both online and in stores: its product scarcity model, which was copied throughout the industry, drove up demand and sparked a fervent resale market. “It is certainly one of the brands that helped make the T-shirt covetable,” Tashjian tells TIME. “Thanks to Supreme, the ‘drop’ has become a fashion buzzword,” GQ wrote in 2019. Brands like Burberry and Gucci have adopted the model.
The company pioneered the concept of collaborations, helping expand its reach. Nike and Supreme first collaborated in the early 2000s: sneaker- and skate-heads lined up outside Supreme’s Manhattan and Tokyo outlets hours before opening. Partnerships with Louis Vuitton, Timberland, Lacoste, Dickies, and others followed; companies like Target and Vineyard Vines have rolled out similar partnerships. In 2018, Trevor Noah presented Jebbia with the menswear Designer of the Year honor at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. Artists such as Damien Hirst designed skate decks: everyone from Kermit the Frog to Madonna to actress Chloë Sevigny, who made her first film appearance in Kids, has appeared on Supreme products. Supreme and Oreo even partnered on a cookie: the wafer was Supreme red and came imprinted with the company logo.
But as those halcyon early boom days recede into the ever-more distant past, Supreme’s challenge has been to stay hot. During the pandemic in 2020, when travel was restricted and many consumers had more disposable income to spend on clothes, participation in skateboarding, a socially distant outdoor activity, spiked, and VF Corporation—whose portfolio includes the North Face, Vans, and Timberland, bought Supreme for $2.1 billion. Supreme’s sales, however, slowed: for the 12 months ending in March 2023, Supreme generated $523.1 million in revenues, down 7% from the prior year. In the fall of 2024, Supreme changed hands again, this time from VC Corporation to EssilorLuxottica, a Europe-based company known for its eyewear portfolio, including Ray-Ban and Oakley, for $1.5 billion.
“I think Supreme almost became kind of overexposed,” says Sky Canaves, fashion analyst at eMarketer, a research firm. “It's hard to preserve that sense of exclusivity and scarcity when the product looks like it's everywhere on everyone.”
Negative headlines have also created headaches. Creative director Tremaine Emory left Supreme in 2023, citing “systemic racism” at the company and claiming that Jebbia had removed images which included depictions of lynching and slavery from a collaboration with Arthur Jafa, a Black artist. (Supreme said in a statement at the time that it disagreed with Emory’s characterization.) In May, New York City pro skateboarder and longtime Supreme ambassador Tyshawn Jones, 26, filed a $26 million defamation lawsuit against the brand, claiming that Supreme effectively tried to blacklist him after terminating his sponsorship contract with the brand. (Supreme declined to comment on the lawsuit.)
Still, Supreme, which has stores in several other major U.S. cities, as well as London, Paris, Milan, and a half-dozen locations in Japan, has entered new markets, opening stores and e-commerce businesses in South Korea in 2023 and China in 2024. Before the sale of Supreme to EssilorLuxottica, VF Corporation reported positive sales momentum during the second half of 2023 into the start of 2024. A few months ago, Supreme opened its first store in Miami.
With 18 outlets in only seven countries, Supreme has more room to expand. “It’s great for young people to have conversations about what's cool and not cool,” says Tashjian. “But it's a wonderful brand with staying power. At this point, it is a company that will be around for a long time.”
Not too shabby for a bunch of skateboard tricksters, just hanging around the shop.
