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When Heron Preston announced earlier this month that he had reacquired full ownership of his namesake brand from New Guards Group (NGG), it underscored a broader shift in the fashion industry’s relationship with hype. His decision to walk away from a platform built to industrialise streetwear cool marks a growing disillusionment with the mechanisms that once powered fashion’s fastest-growing category.
Preston isn’t alone. In recent months, Ambush founders Yoon Ahn and Verbal, along with Alanui’s Carlotta and Nicolò Oddi, have also regained control of their brands from NGG. Their departure is the latest in a string of exits from the Milan-based holding group, acquired by Farfetch in 2019, which built its reputation on incubating zeitgeist-defining labels like Off-White, Palm Angels and Ambush (all brands involved declined to comment).
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As consumer appetite shifted and hype alone lost its cachet, the very incubator model NGG pioneered began to look less like a springboard for innovation and more like a relic of a bygone era. What once promised cultural acceleration now risks becoming an admonition of how quickly relevance can calcify when it’s scaled fast.
Farfetch’s $675 million acquisition of NGG, intended to fuse e-commerce infrastructure with fashion incubation, only deepened the instability. What began as a bold vision of digital synergy struggled under operational complexity, pandemic-era pressures and misaligned brand extensions such as NGG++, a short-lived business unit tasked with expanding into sportswear, failed to gain traction. Launched in 2022, NGG++ was intended to house the design and creative direction of Reebok, following Farfetch’s acquisition of the brand’s global rights (excluding North America) through a licensing deal with Authentic Brands Group. By late 2023, as Farfetch teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and was bailed out by Coupang, NGG filed for bankruptcy protection in Italy.
With the Farfetch deal off the table, Richemont is left to rethink loss-making Yoox Net-a-Porter’s future.
NGG’s decline came alongside a broader disintegration of the very streetwear ecosystem that once made it so influential. The post-2016 era — characterised by logo maximalism, engineered scarcity and the currency of status-flexing — has given way to more personal, niche-driven modes of expression. Following the pandemic’s disruption, the market has stabilised and consumer appetites have matured.
“[Pre-pandemic] was streetwear’s prime, where things were very hype-driven and based on who could flex the biggest logos,” says Kelly Acheampong, founder of Undiscovered, a platform chronicling streetwear and emerging brands. “Today, status is derived from wearing brands people don’t know about. Being part of a community or a collective that isn’t widely known is the new driver of taste.”
The hype economy — and the incubators built to harness it — is facing existential questions. Can cultural credibility survive repeatability? What happens when cool becomes codified? And in a post-hype world, what kind of brand-building actually lasts?
The limits of engineered cool
The New Guards Group was built to do what no traditional conglomerate had managed: platform the underground without sanding down its edge. Rather than acquiring heritage houses, NGG took majority stakes in contemporary brands led by culturally fluent founders — many of whom, like Preston, emerged from Virgil Abloh’s Been Trill collective. The group’s premise was speed and cultural agility: a fast-moving pipeline that could turn a concept into a product within weeks, not seasons.
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However, NGG’s rise was inextricably linked to the broader hype economy — a system of engineered virality, celebrity affiliation, scarcity-led product strategy and cultural capital extraction that defined much of fashion’s growth in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Streetwear’s codes are intrinsically opposite to corporate culture, and therefore any attempt at merging the two would come with a risk of dilution. “The minute a brand is absorbed into a structure like NGG or LVMH, it becomes subject to different pressures; scalability, growth, repeatability,” says Professor Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “These are often at odds with the subcultural credibility and agility that made the brand desirable in the first place. You can scale logistics and operations, but you can’t scale cultural authenticity without diluting it.”
That paradox sits at the heart of the hype machine’s downfall. “Under a public conglomerate, every decision is scrutinised. If it doesn t bring immediate growth, no one wants to support it — it’s too risky. But fashion is emotional, for both the designer and the consumer. If you’re not allowed to play and create beauty, it’s just not going to work,” says Jessica Ramírez, senior research analyst at Jane Hali Associates, who covered Farfetch.
Supreme offers a parallel cautionary tale. Once a symbol of underground credibility, it too has faltered under corporate ownership since being acquired by VF Corp in 2020.
“Followers felt like the brand had sold out, commenting ‘Supreme is dead,’” said Nick Thommen, founder of the @supcommunity Instagram account, in an interview with Vogue Business following VF Corp’s initial acquisition. While the brand generated approximately $561.5 million in revenue in fiscal 2022, that figure fell 7 per cent to $523.1 million in fiscal 2023, missing VF’s $600 million target. Although it rebounded slightly in fiscal 2024, VF took a $735 million impairment charge on Supreme in 2023. The brand was ultimately sold in a $1.5 billion deal to EssilorLuxottica in mid-2024 — a markdown from the $2.1 billion VF paid.
The trajectory illustrates the limits of monetising subcultural capital at scale. Like NGG, Supreme reflects how easily the machinery of hype can falter when it’s removed from the creative communities and scarcity-driven logic that first gave it meaning, and reshuffled under corporate oversight.
“At its core, streetwear has always been a disruptive force – culturally, aesthetically and commercially,” says Rose Coffey, senior foresight analyst at The Future Laboratory. “Which raises a bigger question: when a streetwear brand is absorbed by a holding group, does it become part of the very system it was built to disrupt?”
From drop culture to deep culture
If the last decade was defined by mass virality and engineered scarcity, the most resonant brands today are speaking a different language — one rooted in narrative, subcultural fluency and creative specificity. Rather than broadcasting to the masses, they are building cultural ecosystems designed for depth over scale.
Corteiz, the London-based streetwear label founded by Clint419, exemplifies this approach. “Their use of a password-protected webstore where access was shared only via email was key to their rise,” says Acheampong. “To this day, Corteiz’s Instagram page remains private and only opens during drops. Early on, Clint actively chose which follow requests to accept, ignoring anyone who didn’t fit his vision of the ideal customer. He even refunded orders from resellers to control distribution and preserve authenticity.”
Corteiz’s success is also about clarity of vision. “Clint has built the brand on a strong foundation of storytelling and community,” Acheampong adds. “He knows exactly what Corteiz stands for and never compromises.” From orchestrating chaotic citywide scavenger hunts to launching “Bolo exchanges” where fans trade jackets for branded pieces in public gatherings, Corteiz has consistently turned drops into rituals — building mythos, loyalty and a sense of earned belonging.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn-based collective Mschf operates at the other end of the spectrum, using satire and conceptual performance to critique — and thrive within — the attention economy. Their viral Big Red Boots, or the ATM leaderboard that ranked customers by bank account size, are less about product longevity than cultural shock value. Yet, they resonate because they tap into the absurdity of hype itself, turning spectacle into critique.
Together, these strategies reflect a wider recalibration in how cultural capital and commercial strategy intersect. Today’s most compelling brands are no longer chasing hype in the traditional sense; instead, they’re crafting durable relationships with communities, constructing identities that resonate beyond the instant gratification of a sold-out drop.
“NGG’s misstep was its attempt to fast-track cultural relevance by industrialising hype,” adds Coffey. “It leaned too heavily on a formula of drop culture, capsule collabs, celebrity cosigns and viral moments. What it lacked was creative elasticity — most holding groups want predictability, but streetwear thrives on adaptability, spontaneity and cultural risk.”
Independence as a strategic reset
Preston’s move signals a broader designer-led rejection of the platform model and a shift toward smaller, more autonomous operations. Contemporary label YMC co-founder Jimmy Collins bought the brand back from French Connection last year. While Tomorrow Ltd — the London-based fashion accelerator known for backing brands like Coperni, Martine Rose, and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy — has pared back its portfolio. The brand sold Samuel Ross’s A-Cold-Wall to Frasers Group-backed Four Marketing, and the cult concept store Machine-A exited the accelerator. (Neither responded to a request to comment).
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“It reflects a growing pushback against the commodification of creative identity,” says Groves. “Designers are reasserting control over their own narratives, seeking freedom from the relentless production schedules and branding obligations that come with corporate backing. There’s a clear shift towards independence, slower growth and more meaningful authorship — not just for the sake of it, but as a way to future-proof their relevance.”
Acheampong agrees. “Streetwear is majorly rooted in culture and consumer behaviour, so corporate companies are always going to struggle if they’re not culturally fluent,” he says. “In a space like streetwear, which is based on authenticity, connection and community, portfolio companies tend to prioritise numbers over people.”
That tension — between creativity and commercialisation — has always existed in fashion. But in the streetwear space, where cultural credibility is both currency and code, it becomes a pressure point that few incubators have successfully managed. NGG, once heralded as the next LVMH for Gen Z, now stands as a warning: you can scale hype, but you can’t make it last.
“Ultimately, the problem lies in scaling hype instead of deepening the story,” says Coffey. “Today’s consumers align with brands that cultivate genuine cultural connections — not those chasing virality for its own sake.”
The real question now is what comes next. As legacy streetwear brands exit their holding deals and the incubator model contracts, space is opening for a new generation of independent creators — many of whom are rejecting of hype, and in this post-hype world, the future of fashion will be shaped not by how fast a brand can scale, but how deeply it can matter.
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