It's not just a store The mystic of Supreme stores: from the first in SoHo to the last one just opened in Brera

Today, the word Supreme evokes almost immediately a red rectangle with the word printed in Futura Bold Oblique. Like a déjà vu, the brand has managed to embed its logo in the culture and collective memory thanks to a specific, unique brand building, which has already entered the marketing books. It involves the world of reselling, collaborations, artificial scarcity but often one aspect of the brand is overlooked: the stores. Supreme, in fact, before being a brand, was born as a shop and has never - except for a few very short periods - distributed outside the network of the current thirteen locations around the world, including the one in Milan just opened in Corso Garibaldi. The store from its early days to the camp-outs is the place where the mystic of the brand, fueled by history, resell and much more, takes physical presence with a cyclical ritual that makes the experience of entering Supreme different from any other store. 

It was the spring of 1994 when James Jebbia, a former Union and Stussy shop assistant, rented the walls of a decrepit space at 274 Lafayette Street, Manhattan, New York City, with a deposit of 12 thousand dollars. In the first half of the 90s the city was still gloomy, bent first by financial default and then by the first great wave of crack; the city offered no jobs, had the highest crime rate in the United States, and many central areas lived in decay and neglect; Taxi Driver and The Warriors are two films that reflect the narrative of the time. Despite poverty and social problems, the sidewalks of New York remained a place where different cultures influenced each other: the skaters of Washington Square (as portrayed by Harmony Korine and Larry Clark in Kids), the black community of Harlem, the penniless artists of SoHo. Lafayette Street was often crowded by drug dealers or prostitutes, and the shops were mostly small family businesses, but there was also the legendary Keith Haring pop store. SoHo's gentrification process was already underway, but it would take a few more years to complete, with the independent galleries moving across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg. 

Today Lafayette Street is one of the most beautiful streets in SoHo, where houses and shops have astronomical prices and instead of drug dealers and skaters there are coffee shops that serve excellent matcha tea. In 2019 Supreme definitively left the location where it was born and this I believe is ultimately what makes unique a brand born on a New York sidewalk that has now become a tourist attraction in a shopping street of the fashion capital of Milan: to cross fashion, aesthetics and culture while remaining relevant.