Supreme, Volume 2 Covers a Lot of Ground, From Skateboarding to Streetwear Domination
Supreme is a brand of contradictions. It is at once New York’s homegrown skate shop, the place where many of the city’s most prolific and influential people came up and hung out, but also a company valued at $1 billion that is majority-owned by the private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Yes, the same company Taylor Swift is feuding with over its backing of Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta’s purchase of her former label, the very one that Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are holding up as symbols of capitalist greed, is also backing the purveyor of your favorite box-logo tee. In 2019, Supreme is both a community and a corporation, a lifestyle and a logo, a business that became popular for its parodies of others that is now being parodied itself. It’s really cool to have a product from Supreme and also sort of uncool. Toting around both of Supreme’s books for the past week, I’ve been met with both oohs and boos.
All that to say there’s a lot the brand has to contend with in its new tome, Supreme, Volume 2, which was released in a limited edition online and in its stores today. (The limited edition, which has already sold out, comes with a sleeve, poster, and sticker; a wider release in January will be absent these assets.) Published by Phaidon and priced at $50, the new book chronicles the brand from 2008 to 2018. These are its transitional years, the time when Supreme skaters and collaborators went from being local legends to directing Beyoncé and Jay Z music videos.
The brand itself has glowed up significantly too. In the past two years, Supreme has won the Menswear Designer of the Year Award from the CFDA, collaborated with Louis Vuitton (a brand that once sued Supreme for copyright infringement), and sold a majority stake of its business to the aforementioned private equity firm. The secondary market booms with Supreme goods while auction houses compete over who can host the most profitable sale of grail items like skate decks, LV-branded trunks, and pinball machines. On Instagram, Supreme has 13.5 million followers; accounts that discuss it or mock it also have fans in the millions.
Its universe was significantly smaller when the brand released its first book, Supreme, Volume 1, in 2008. With an introduction by Glenn O’Brien, an essay by Aaron Bondaroff, and an 11-page interview between Jebbia and Kaws, the original Supreme tome felt personal—and even a little revealing. The key figures of the Supreme lifestyle were opening up their world, and it was a grittily un-glamorous one. There are way more trash cans covered in Supreme stickers in Volume 1 than in Volume 2. There are more peeling posters, more naked women, more goofing off, and much more rawness around the edges. That first book was a big-time declaration of making it by a bunch of dudes who lived on the fringes of the worlds of fashion, art, and culture. In 2008, Supreme was still a weird fascination. Now it’s everything.
As such, Supreme, Volume 2 functions as a lesson on what happens when something once niche goes mainstream. The brand that is still so much about its core group of friends, skaters, and collaborators, now has to contend with its corporate status. The 351-page book deals with this by not dealing with it at all, really. There is no Jebbia interview to explain how Supreme has changed, no quotes from the people who were there to make and remake its image. Instead the book is introduced with an essay by critic Carlo McCormick and with a poem by Harmony Korine. The pages that follow are glossy, with photos of Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, and a still from Ben Solomon’s 2011 film, Aerial, showing the Supreme flag waving over the Statue of Liberty. In between the celebrities, a lot of the first and second waves of Supreme crew weave in and out, with Jason Dill, Alex Olson, Kevin Bradley, and Dylan Rieder appearing in candid photos. The second-to-last image in the book is of Tyshawn Jones crying while receiving Thrasher’s skater of the year award in 2018.
