Streetwear as a Cult among Young People - Everybody Supreme

It is common to see the millennials wearing popular streetwear brand on the street, such as Anti Social Social Club, Champion, Supreme and so on, streetwear brand is becoming more and more popular in recent years: it can be “sold out” in 15 - 30 seconds after a new season product released and attract long lines of young people including teenagers outside their stores wait to buy the new products. It seems that streetwear brands, which were treated as marginalized culture, are turning around to the mainstream and the price of the product also rising greatly. For instance, a classic Supreme box logo hoodie have to cost $4000 Hong Kong dollars, most creazly, Supreme released a brick with its logo pricing for $200 Hong Kong dollars and according to the report of The Wall Street Journal, the brand Supreme now is worth $1 Billion.

The value of streetwear is about an attitude of life and an exclusive identity. Streetwear came from American street culture, usually as a symbol of subculture all the time, however, nowadays, with the boom of Hip-pop culture, they are gradually becoming the symbol or label of identity of young people. Mainly message delivered by those brands almost about breaking the traditional rules and bondage from the society, seeking for true self, which cater to the value of young people who like to advertise themselves as “unique” and express their belief by wearing streetwear and posting them on social media. The streetwear product is not only an item for the young people rather than a sign or symbol to present the attitude of anti-mainstream, anti-constructed social discourse about young people and be different. Nevertheless, I think it is hard for the millennials to make a difference in the existed structure through consumption of streetwear label, on the contrary, their values and behaviours are used to reinforcing the existence of construction of discourse by media unconsciously. In this essay, I would like to explain my argument of the streetwear was manipulated to reinforce social discourse from 2 aspects: 1. Resistance as the process of constructing new culture; 2. Manipulation behind streetwear culture.

Resistance as the process of constructing new culture

Resistance as the process of constructing new culture means the process that teenagers try to fight with the existed social discourses labeled on them is to building a new cultural discourses on themselves. In Hong Kong, the mainstream value is inclinate to elitism, people have a set of definition about what is elite judged by programme or school you studied, career, and even friends around you. Now the young generation seems tired of these entrenched expectations about them, they want to tell the public they are unique and have multiple possibilities of life. It implied that they have realized that they lived in a world that full of discourses and try to refuse living such life. That is the original idea of the birth of streetwear, a group of people who like playing skateboard or rapping together was deemed as “deviant” as they refuse live by following the discourses, they insisted in doing things they considered as valuable and enjoying the pleasure by creating until their existence was accept by more and more people. However, when the value was accepted by more people, a new culture was built. The idea of focusing on the pleasure brought by satisfy self-desire was changed into the direction of consumption a certain brand to prove somebody was not belongs to mainstream, but in this way, people start fall into a new cultural discourse that young people wear streetwear are chic, individualized and unbounded, such phenomenon actually already gave a new sign to the young people: if you want to express yourself as those characters mentioned above, you should pick streetwear, thus, a new phenomenon hit to the group of young people: they spend lots of money on buying an identity from a popular brand without knowing the logic and truth value of the brand. To be concrete, when search Supreme in social media, for example, Instagram, Facebook or Discuss.com.hk, the situation are, all the people are talk about the size, color, style, price of the new release, also there are lots of people show their collection of Supreme products with others leave their comments about “wow, you are super rich” or they compare with each other about the collection and conclude that they feel pity that they didn’t grab a specific item when it released. This situation shows that part of people do not care about the value or belief about the brand anymore, their discussion about Supreme turned from the message behind of a specific T-shirt printing the work of an artist to which brand that Supreme cooperate with and which style was the most hot and chic one. When majority of people started to ignore the logic and meanings of a brand and buy the brand as a sign of a certain identity, obviously, we break social discourses by building another one, which exactly reinforced discourses are unbreakable and it exist everywhere.

Therefore, the resistance is not the right way to fight opposite with the discourse, as the idea of Michel Foucault, avoiding being controlled by the discourses, people have to follow their desire with their own standardization. The core value of reject controlling of social discourses is not how we resist it, rather that how we plan to take care of self-desire. If we can take advantage of these social discourses to achieve the self-pleasure with our own logic, it is kind of fighting because we control the discourses instead of letting them control us. However, most of people still controlled by the culture discourse without awaring how their behaviour was manipulated by the power of social structure.

Manipulation Behind Streetwear Culture

The resource that manipulated our behaviours is the background of social structure and media take an important role of helping creating values on the commercial product by taking advantage of our mind of seeking way to get rid of culture discourses and achieve individual values. We can figure it out from the way that Supreme promoting itself.

First of all, they proposed “to ensure the culture of utmost respect and empowerment to individuals and be a catalyst in enhancing their competencies” as one of their mission, they claims that it is not I am going to cater to you, but you are chasing me. The promotion message “refuse catering” is catering to the attitude of anti-consumerism of young people. Unlike most big fashion companies, who like to find super celebrities as endorser, they like to cooperate with unpopular artists and print their artworks on the product, according to the interview with some of my friends who like the brand, they said “the brand has a good taste on the selection of artist and artworks, it is cool to explain to other people who don’t know about who they are while they ask what I’m wearing.” However, recently, while the price was increased so crazy, they have doubt about whether the brand is insist on the original belief at the very beginning, here is the quote from the interviewee, who is the year 4 student of visual arts in Hong Kong Baptist University: “I start less like this brand right now, because it seems to be more commercialized than before and the number of people who love it increased greatly, I don’t feel exclusive at all, besites, it started to cooperate with luxury brands, and try to expand its influences and constantly improve the price, now I wonder if his product is worth to this price. But I still pay attention on the new season release, see whether there are some special things can buy” It seems that there are lots of fans love the brand due to the brand make them feel they are special and have a good taste. Except for the design style makes people feel unequal, they also a master of scarcity, as the limitation of the product, lots of people have to not only paid money, but also spend time and energies to queue up for the new products before the store, they make the brand value through make use to the culture of scarcity, because in the traditional social culture people treat limited things as good and valuable things and of course, good things deserve a high price. It is the commodity fetishism, the media coverage, aura of stars and limited sales, make people think streetwear is cool, but in fact, it is the trick of media that to package all of this measurable products into an extragged immeasurable value to fit the imagination of young people what they buy is worth than the money they paid. In these ways, Supreme build the image of against on break down mainstream cultural discourses and be exclusive individuals based on usage of various discourses that already exists in our mind.

Secondly, let’s have a look on the way they doing promotion. Because knowing that young people hate the mainstream and prefer individualized personality, they do not use mainstream approaches to propaganda, such as doing television commercial, printing advertising and they do not use celebrity effects such as sent celebrities clothes, sponsor drama, and they even reject mass production, products of every season are limited. They use this uniqueness of brand proposition to arouse young people’s common sense, but this kind of uniqueness is based on the discourses of “mainstream”, as people deem these values as a sign of uniqueness based on it is opposite of mainstream discourses. Therefore, it still use the power of culture discourses to justify themselves, they make noises on the mainstream culture and encourage people to negotiate challenge with the present dominate values in order to construct a new discourses to occupy the young people’s market. It is a process of symbolization, give the young target people a cultural resource, that is the brand, to let them be themselves by label the brand on the clothes.

Consequences

Based on the new discourses they created, there are some consequences that appeared in the society. The Supreme as a brand, symbolized an exclusive identity and the discourses followed by the symbol is buy the brand equal to break the tradition, which may mislead the target audiences, especially those teenagers who have weak critical thinking about new trends, that unique and the “cool” personality is consumptive with money. Therefore, there are two consequences appeared, one is give a wrong sign to young people that they can overcross the line of social structure by buying stuff with “imagined meaningful value” but actual created by media and still controlled under social structure; the other one refers to a sacrifice on young people’s contribution to creativity and practice on real fighting. For the first situation, based on what I mentioned before, we can see that how media giving a methodology to a specific brand. They used to add values to the products of Supreme, the coverage they written about Supreme or other streetwear brands from the perspective of how much the brand worth on purpose or they like to report which famous people is a big fan of which brand and analyse the cerelities’ clothing style. Still take an example of Supreme, lots of media written feature reports about a galley on the members of Supreme’s cooperators, but usually they will include the most famous group, for example, Lady Gaga, Kate Moss, and Mike Tyson, those famous people’s taste was recognized as good and advance, related the product with those persons shaped the product of Supreme as a representation of cultural value and justified a high price of these products. During the branding process, people was cultivated that consumption of these products brought by so many celebrities synonymous with a good taste, an independent personality or more directly with a cool appearances. Meanwhile, the process of creating extra value for streetwear brands to encourage consumption is a misleading to the young people that consumption is purchasing resistance and their behaviour was fighting against the manipulate power in the society, but in fact, the young people is the money machine of the manipulator from top bourgeois.

For the second consequences might brought by product symbolization, while young people start resort to consumption as the way to purchase exclusive, the sacrifice would be the creativities and production abilities. As the consumption will provides gratifications, through the creation and satisfaction they obtained from false needs of consumption, they will be lazy to create their own things and value, because in the world of consumerism, most people have a false belief on everything can be consumptive. Especially for streetwear brands, their product are limited and try to give people a wrong perception of they put on huge effort on obtaining a stuff, which is more than a product instead of a belief. They turn the process of consumption to a tangible way where make people have a deep feeling about they are trying so hard to get a limitation product, the satisfaction and pleasure may comes from both consumption process and post - consumption experiences: “Although the process of consumption is suffering but the expectation of getting a product that is limited is exciting, after I got it, I’ll post them on the social media because my friends get jealous and it last the satisfaction of this consumption” said by a fan of supreme. So it is easy for young people to get the pleasure through consumption and the pleasure they chased is not only from the brand, but lots of from other people’s perception on their behaviour. While it is easy to get satisfaction from just consumption who is willing to create something instead? On the same logic, media label the streetwear brands as exclusive and challenge for traditional value and young people were encouraged to achieve their value through peast these brand on themselves, based on extragged value and identity of the power of streetwear brands, the young generation will more likely to express their attitude only through consumption on these brands and give up invested in the real social movements or artwork creation in order to really care about the society and try to change many unfair issues brought by structure, such as gender equality, problems of poverty in Hong Kong. We live in the era of information, we accepted lots of messages everyday, but lots of people lack of ability of critical thinking in the time of full of expertise and influencers. For the young people with weak analysis and critical thinking about the issues happened on the society, they can only followed the media and listening to those influencer’s suggestions about what’s on trending, they almost choose to give up their own opportunity to contribute their effort to productivity while media already provided all the suggestion they need, for example, I see few of classmates skip the class of research method on later November in order to line up for the limited sneakers promotion. Maybe the promotion in the social media of the sneakers make them feel like they definitely cannot miss the chance or they have to wait for so long time to get second chance to buy one, they are influenced by the new cultural discourse about young generation that be young should be exclusive, skip class is cool because people only know about study is bound by the mainstream value and treated as nerds.

In conclusion, nowadays, media plays an important role about shaping streetwear brands as the symbol of a new culture of exclusive and individualized attitude and personality among the millennials, it cultivated the young generation to express their exclusive and value through label the brand on the clothes. Most importantly, media use tricks and social discourses to make parts of young people obsessing in the feeling of get rid of old traditional cultural discourses, which means they reinforce the fixed social discourses by giving new discourses and made them accept it unconsciously. And in the end, it would lead to situations of young people fall into false pleasure needs about consumption and sacrifices of the contribution on creativity and real practice on fighting against the issues brought by structure.

References:

Fowler, D. (2018, February 05). Capital - The hype machine: Streetwear and the business of scarcity. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180205-the-hype-machine-streetwear-and-the-business-of-scarcity