Supreme sold for £2.1 billion in 2020. A box logo hoodie costs £200. The original NYC skaters who built the brand in the 90s can't easily afford it anymore.
This raises a question worth sitting with: Is Supreme still streetwear? And if we're not sure, what does that tell us about what streetwear actually means?
What Streetwear Actually Means
Streetwear emerged in the 1980s and 90s from communities that mainstream fashion ignored. Black and brown youth in urban neighborhoods. Skaters who couldn't afford designer clothes. Hip-hop kids making their own style out of necessity.
It wasn't aspirational. It was accessible. A Carhartt jacket worn by construction workers became a hip-hop staple not because of marketing, but because it was durable, affordable, and real. Early Stüssy came from surf culture, hand-printed by Shawn Stussy himself. Supreme started as a skate shop on Lafayette Street, making clothes for the kids who actually skated there.
The core principles were simple:
Accessibility. Made by and for communities that couldn't afford mainstream fashion. Priced for the people who created the culture.
Authenticity. Rooted in lived experience, not brand strategy. You wore it because it represented who you were, not who you wanted to appear to be.
Community. Built through word of mouth. Spread through skate parks, block parties, and underground shows. Not algorithms.
Resistance. Counter-cultural by nature. Anti-establishment. A middle finger to the fashion industry that excluded you.
Here's what matters: streetwear has always been defined by these principles. When a brand drifts from them, it's worth asking whether the label still fits the same way it once did.
The Lifecycle: How Streetwear Brands Evolve
Most streetwear brands follow a recognisable trajectory. It's not inevitable, but it's common enough to be worth examining.
Phase 1: Pure Streetwear
Small production runs. The founder is probably still packing boxes. Prices sit around £20-40 because that's what the community can afford. The designs come from lived experience, not trend forecasting. Palace Skateboards in 2009 looked like this. Local skaters wearing clothes made by other skaters.
Phase 2: Growth and Tension
Demand increases. Production scales up. The first luxury collaboration happens. Maybe a celebrity wears your hoodie in a music video. The community is still there, still engaged, but you can feel the tension building. Supreme between 2010-2017 lived here. Still connected to skate culture, but the hypebeasts were arriving.
Phase 3: The Crossroads
This is where the choice happens. Corporate acquisition. Luxury pricing. Artificial scarcity designed for profit, not culture. Celebrity endorsements replace community connection. Marketing budget becomes more important than cultural contribution.
Supreme post-2020 entered this territory. VF Corporation saw value in the brand, and the acquisition changed things. Whether that means Supreme stopped being streetwear or simply became a different kind of streetwear is a question worth debating.
Phase 4: Commercial Fashion with Streetwear DNA
At some point, a brand's connection to its original community becomes more historical than present. The aesthetic remains. The cultural roots are real. But the day-to-day reality of who buys it, who it's priced for, and what it represents has shifted.
Supreme, BAPE, and Off-White all sit somewhere in this conversation. They have undeniable streetwear origins. Whether they still embody streetwear's core principles is where opinions diverge.
The important thing to understand: this trajectory isn't inevitable. It's a series of choices. Every brand at Phase 2 or 3 decides whether to prioritise culture or capital. The path isn't predetermined.
The Luxury Question
Louis Vuitton was never streetwear. Balenciaga was never streetwear. Gucci was never streetwear.
But they all use the term now. They all make "streetwear-inspired" pieces. And they all charge £500 for a hoodie.
The pattern is consistent: identify an authentic cultural movement gaining momentum, collaborate with a legitimate streetwear brand to gain credibility, extract the aesthetic elements that made it cool, sell it back at significant markup, then gradually redefine the term to include your products.
Louis Vuitton's collaboration with Supreme in 2017 was a turning point. It brought streetwear aesthetics into high fashion spaces, but it also blurred lines that had previously been clearer. Some saw it as validation. Others saw it as the beginning of something being lost.
The concern is specific: streetwear was created by marginalised communities as accessible fashion. When luxury brands adopt the term while charging prices those communities can't afford, something gets distorted.
Kids in East London are wearing £200 Supreme hoodies, saving for months, because Supreme still carries cultural weight. But the question of whether Supreme still serves them, or primarily serves shareholders now, is one worth asking honestly.
This isn't just about cultural appropriation. It's about what happens when a movement built on accessibility gets absorbed into systems built on exclusivity. The language stays the same, but the meaning shifts underneath it.
Why Discovery Is Broken
Try to find authentic streetwear brands online right now. Actually try.
You'll find END and Karmaloop, but they're retailers optimising for conversions. You'll find Hypebeast's directory, but it spotlights Nike and Adidas, not the 19-year-old in Manchester making £25 tees for their local community. You'll find Instagram and TikTok, but their algorithms favour marketing budgets, not cultural contribution.
Every platform that lists clothing brands has been shaped by commerce. They either sell directly, take affiliate cuts, or prioritise paid placements. Even the ones that claim to support independent brands are often marketplaces in disguise.
The result? Brands keeping streetwear's original principles alive get buried. The kid in East London making accessible clothes for their community doesn't have a £10k marketing budget. They don't have influencer connections. They just have good designs and genuine connection to their culture.
But platforms don't surface that. They surface engagement metrics, conversion rates, and ad revenue.
So we're left with a landscape where the biggest names dominate the conversation and smaller voices struggle to be heard.
Who's Keeping It Real?
The brands embodying streetwear's original principles are out there. They're just hard to find.
They're charging £20-40 for tees because that's what their community can afford. They're donating portions of profits to local causes. They're building actual relationships with the people who wear their clothes. They're making design decisions based on cultural authenticity, not trend reports.
They're in London, Tokyo, Lagos, São Paulo, Atlanta. They're the next generation of streetwear, still in their pure phase, still prioritising community over capital.
But they need infrastructure. They need a place where authenticity matters more than marketing budget. Where community validation counts more than follower count. Where you can be discovered based on cultural contribution, not SEO optimisation.
That's why we're building Streetwear Directory. Not as another marketplace. Not as another blog drowning in affiliate links. As a pure directory focused solely on discovery. No e-commerce. No paid placements. No algorithmic manipulation.
Just a curated platform celebrating brands while they're still rooted in streetwear's original principles. A space where tomorrow's iconic brands can be found today, by people who actually understand the culture.
We're launching Summer 2026 with 100 brands that are keeping it real. Transparent metrics showing genuine community engagement, not inflated follower counts.
The Point
This isn't about gatekeeping. Brands can grow. They can make money. They can evolve in whatever direction they choose.
But definitions matter. When "streetwear" can mean both a £25 tee made by someone in your neighbourhood and a £1,000 hoodie from a luxury conglomerate, the word starts losing its usefulness.
The question "Is Supreme still streetwear?" isn't really about Supreme. It's about whether we can maintain any meaningful distinction between fashion that serves communities and fashion that extracts from them.
If we let "streetwear" become meaningless, if we let it mean "any clothing brand that uses bold logos regardless of price or ethos," then we lose the ability to talk about what made this culture meaningful in the first place. We lose the ability to point young people toward brands that actually embody the principles streetwear was built on.
The next generation deserves to know that streetwear was born from necessity, creativity, and resistance. That it was made by people like them, for people like them. That accessibility wasn't a limitation; it was the point.
Join Us
Supreme's evolution tells us something important about the tension every streetwear brand faces. Growth and authenticity don't have to be opposites, but staying true to original principles requires intentional choices.
Meanwhile, the brands still putting community first, still pricing for accessibility, still rooted in the culture that created this movement, they're out there. They just need to be found.
If you're interested in platforms that prioritise culture over commerce, authenticity over algorithms, and meaning over marketing budgets, we're building something different.
Sign up at streetwear.directory for early access. Help us surface what authentic streetwear looks like in 2026.
Because this culture is worth protecting.