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“I never did Supreme for the money,” says Tremaine Emory. He was speaking as news broke of his resignation as Supreme’s first-ever creative director after 18 months in the role. “I’m just about the radical truth. Because when you tell the truth, there’s nothing to worry about.”
Which is why, as he ordered eggs at his regular Tribeca breakfast spot, Emory prepared to serve his take on precisely what ended his time at the streetwear brand. That news was first reported on Wednesday by Complex, citing anonymous sources; Supreme confirmed the exit to Business of Fashion on Thursday.
In a letter to colleagues, shared by Emory with Vogue Business, he stated that his resignation was over Supreme founder James Jebbia’s failure to communicate the decision to cancel a collaboration with artist Arthur Jafa for four months, which made Emory believe that “systemic racism was at play within the structure of Supreme”.
Supreme and parent company VF Corp did not respond to Vogue Business’s requests for comment. In a statement to Business of Fashion, Supreme refuted this claim, stating: “We strongly disagree with Tremaine’s characterisation of our company and the handling of the Arthur Jafa project, which has not been cancelled.” It added: “We are disappointed it did not work out with Tremaine and wish him the best of luck going forward.”
From Tribeca, Emory is keen to disambiguate. He says that before suffering an aortic aneurysm last October that left him unable to work as he recovered until April this year, he began to prepare the collaboration with Jafa. Like Emory himself, Jafa is an artist and writer whose output lays bare the traumatic legacy of the African-American experience in order to ensure it is never forgotten. Supreme has long used provocative imagery to promote its radical image, and Emory planned to harness that heritage to Jafa’s imagery in order to, as he puts it, “paint the Black experience on clothing”.
Emory worked with Jafa to paint that experience unflinchingly. Three of the photographs chosen by the creative director and artist depicted the lynching of a Black person, the scars from the flogging of a former slave known as “Saint Gordon”, and an image of a Black man who has bleached his skin from the waist down with the exception of his penis.
If these images sound confronting, that’s because they were designed to be. As Emory says of Supreme, “They want to say it’s a skate brand, but it’s based off Black culture. We put out a Prodigy T-shirt that shows a Black man in jail that says HNIC — that stands for Head N****r In Charge — but we can’t put out an Arthur Jafa collab?”
Emory says that in August, four months after he returned to work, he discovered that those three Jafa images had been pulled during his time away on medical leave. As he also explained in a series of Instagram posts today, he was told by Jebbia that they were cancelled after two Black members of the Supreme brand studio expressed disquiet over the images.
Supreme’s decision to cancel the collaboration without involving Emory led him to resign some three weeks ago. “My issue isn’t whether it got cancelled or not,” he says. “It’s that they didn’t talk to me about it for four months. I’m the creative director. And they were talking about it in the C-suite, which I’m a part of, behind my back. That’s systemic racism. Because they’re scared to talk to me about it.”
He recalls a conversation with Jebbia following his resignation. “The reason he didn’t tell me about it is because he didn’t want me to convince him to do [the collaboration]. And I said to James, ‘Maybe the reason why Black men keep getting lynched in some form or fashion is because we don t show the kids what happened.’… And he looks at me and goes: ‘You’re right. Yeah, I was wrong’. He admitted he was wrong.” Emory also detailed the account of this conversation on Instagram on Thursday. Supreme did not respond to a request for comment on this exchange.
Supreme told Business of Fashion that the Jafa collaboration has not been cancelled, but is merely as yet unreleased. Emory says that this is a reversal prompted by his insistence that the article cite “systemic racism” when announcing his departure, and that only after knowledge of the forthcoming article did Supreme move to contact Arthur Jafa in order go ahead with the collaboration and the use of the images.
When Supreme recruited Emory in February 2022, the streetwear brand was entering a new and sensitive phase of its development following its $2.1 billion acquisition by US apparel conglomerate VF Corp in December 2020. Supreme was founded by Jebbia in 1994 as a skate brand that combined the maverick spirits of surfwear pioneer Shawn Stussy and fashion chimera Martin Margiela in order to meld bootleg soul with Veblen process.
As an independent company (albeit one with eventual equity investment), Supreme’s subversively anarchic output and policy of carefully managed scarcity had made it the foundational brand in 21st century “streetwear”. Once part of VF Corp — alongside The North Face, Timberland, Vans and others — Supreme’s challenge was to generate the growth that acquisition demanded without diluting the brand’s core anti-establishment identity that was central to its appeal.
Combining Supreme’s heritage with Emory’s authorship seemed, on paper, an astute way to meet this challenge. Through his 2019-founded brand Denim Tears, Emory had emerged as such a compelling and important voice in the US fashion space. Three of his designs were featured in the 2021 exhibition “America: A Lexicon of Fashion” at the Metropolitan Museum’s Anna Wintour Costume Center — a canonical achievement of which Emory is justly proud.
Born in Atlanta and raised in Jamaica in Queens, New York, Emory is a creative artist whose output is defined by his commitment to social justice and his experience as a Black man. As he told GQ last July, when he was starting out in retail he would end his day hanging out in Union NYC, the seminal streetwear store co-founded by Jebbia and Mary Ann Fusco. Before taking a job with Marc Jacobs in 2006, he had been due to interview with Jebbia for a role at the store.
That role with Jacobs allowed him to move to London four years later after the murder of a friend, Rahim Grays, compelled him to leave New York. In London he connected with Acyde (Ade Odunlumi) and together they founded the party-throwing and creative-consulting partnership No Vacancy Inn. Emory worked with Frank Ocean, Ye and Stussy (the brand, not the man) before being inspired in 2019 to found his own clothing brand. As he told GQ in that profile, the inspiration was fired by Supreme.
He said: “The name [Denim Tears] applies to cotton, and slavery, and the glory and plight of the African diaspora. My father’s first job was picking cotton, as a kid…. Once I was in the Supreme store in London and they did these Martin Luther King hoodies and the hoodies were on sale. And I just thought, this is a problem: these should be sold out. Then I thought, what if I can make a brand that makes kids line up to buy and wear clothes that are about the plight and glory of the African American experience — that would be something worth doing.”
Speaking today at the end of his 18 months in Supreme, Emory said his immediate plan is to travel to Paris with his fiancée, Andee, and regroup. And he repeated: “I never did Supreme for the money… You know the week I started at Supreme, we dropped 5,000 pairs of denim on Denim Tears. It sold out in minutes and we took $1.7 million. My annual salary at Supreme was $600,000. I didn’t need to do it for money. I did it to change things.” Now, says Emory, he will concentrate all his energy to create change through the brand he founded, and which he controls.
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