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  Whatever and however you call it, streetwear is rooted in diversity and an exchange of cultures. Not solely skateboarding. Not just hip-hop or runway fashion or the avant-garde. Streetwear incorporates all of these effects, and the nineties street labels understood this well. This chapter bestowed a new breed of underground T-shirt iconoclasts: Freshjive, X-Large, and Tribal on the West. Triple Five Soul, PNB Nation, and Pervert on the East. L.A. influenced New York, which set off London and Tokyo. Streetwear had already gone global, courtesy of the International Stüssy Tribe’s presence in London and the aforementioned cities. But Stüssy’s disciples would eventually step out of their shadow. The best example of this was a Japanese DJ and designer named Nigo who appropriated what he admired from American street brands and created A Bathing Ape, otherwise known as Bape. Nigo’s $300 sweatshirts and upscale gallery boutiques set the benchmark for how streetwear would come to be considered—as art piece, as obnoxious Bentley driver’s uniform, as status symbol. Supreme, James Jebbia’s skate company out of New York, also offered its perspective on high-end, exclusive streetwear. Its trademark retail a-hole attitude, cross-grain fleece, and premium collaborations captured the imagination of streetwear connoisseurs from here to Harajuku.

  In the early 2000s, I was a big fan of Alife, a four-person New York City design collective that produced small runs of thoughtful streetwear pieces and co-branded sneakers. Their original shop on Orchard Street featured a vast mural for guest artists, a curated selection of product from obscure makers, and, overlooking it all, a second-story studio on a mezzanine. As a customer, you could look up to the office window and see the tops of Jest’s and Tony’s heads, bowed over their desks, working on something important and cool. I loved how connected the designers were with the product and boutique.2 Sure, the T-shirts were woven with the same cotton as those of a mainstream label, but the clothing felt personal and special because of the experience. I appreciated the independent, artistic spirit that drove the Alife name, and I’d leave the shop feeling inspired and even a bit envious. I could design and print T-shirts too. I wanted to play.

  I wasn’t the only one.

  The next streetwear progeny was forged in the shadows of desktop publishing and garage screen printing, far from the spotlight that showered major designers. Streetwear’s raw and seditious spirit made a lot of sense during this period when Old Navy commercials governed the fashion landscape. Fashion is funny because as unique as they strive to be, consumers ultimately want to swing in the same direction, but there are always the black sheep running toward the other end of the pendulum’s arc, in defiance of the establishment, championing independent thought.

  People like me and Ben and The Hundreds, Ray and Denis of Mighty Healthy, Greg and Mike of Mishka—we followed in the steps of the OGs. But we also learned from their mistakes. Like all arrogant youth, we were drunk off ego and believed we knew better, could fix the broken scene, and design cooler clothing. The new era of streetwear was open to wholesaling, anchored by heavy plastisol-ink graphics on Alstyle blank T-shirts, and communicated with the customer through blogs.

  The internet brought us together, and we joined forces at trade shows with other American brands in our class like Crooks & Castles, Hellz Bellz, Reason, Married to the Mob, and Huf.

  Although streetwear’s roots sprouted decades earlier, the mid-2000s apparel companies and retailers gave the genre a name, erected an industry, and transformed a wishful subculture into big business. The sneaker blogs and hip-hop magazines sank their teeth into this hot new trend. Some argue that streetwear as we know it today started here. Taking cues from Nike, Supreme, and Japanese lines that applied a luxury-goods philosophy to casual street clothes, we retooled and remastered streetwear. We honed the art of limited-edition distribution, produced collaborations that were low on profit and high on noise, and refined the science of branding.

  Depending on how you slice and dice it, streetwear today is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy. It’s been elevated from niche fashion to mainstream uniform and can be seen on the backs of the coolest and trendiest, whether you’re a sixth grader or a sixty-year-old. Streetwear has gotten so big that it’s overtaken all other sectors, from high fashion to athleisure. Any designer with a hoodie in their collection is now deemed “streetwear.” The term is practically devoid of meaning. Sometimes, it feels like we’re the last standing streetwear brand. At other times, it feels like we’re not streetwear at all. Streetwear, like hip-hop music, has gone pop. And as with rap, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an underground. There are just multiple strains now. Nuanced customers. Today, we’re faced with a multitude of voices and languages, a veritable streetwear Tower of Babel. We may not sound alike, or even understand one another, but we all share a cool attitude that radiates from our respective cultures and a love of rare product and meticulous design. It’s that love that most readily defines what “streetwear” has become.

  7.   ESCAPE TO LOS ANGELES

  All I know is that I don’t know

  All I know is that I don’t know nothing

  —Operation Ivy, “Knowledge”

  IN THE SUMMER of 2001, with the late afternoon sun in my eyes, I loaded my life and laundry basket into the trunk of my Honda CR-V and merged onto the 5 North. I’d graduated from college after four years in San Diego and was making the big move to Los Angeles, possibly to pursue acting or design or to intern at an ad agency. I wanted the progressive life I’d read about in New York hipster rags like Paper, but here on the West Coast. I envisioned myself as an accomplished artist, following in the footsteps of graffiti artists turned gallery painters like Twist and Margaret Kilgallen. Only problem being I wasn’t a vetted artist—not a very good one anyway. I was a dilettante at worst, a dabbler at best. I had never taken a formal art class in my life, nor did I know how to use any of the tools of the trade beyond a Krylon can or a Mean Streak paint marker. Even if I could get my technical chops up to par, how would I get my work seen?

  To buy time, I fell back on my experience as a freelance magazine writer and photographer. I shot local concerts, reviewed fashion collections and CD advances, and profiled of-the-moment bands for magazines like Mass Appeal. Freelancing was a thin and unpredictable path for a college grad, but it was a lot of fun and it paid the rent. I made up my own hours, got paid a buck a word, and took advantage of the opportunities to travel.

  I signed the lease on a shoe-box studio apartment off the shoulder of the 10 freeway, strictly because the surrounding complex resembled Daniel Larusso’s home in The Karate Kid. It was a lonely and overcast season of my life. I was friendless in a new city with no career prospects. I wondered if maybe I should look into PR or marketing, but advertising agencies—boutique to big—denied me at the door. Most of my college buddies were in graduate school or staking their claim in the real world by working their first big desk jobs. They’d visit me after work in their wrinkle-free Banana Republic clothes. They were growing up, and here I was in my Dickies and Converse, hunting for retro Jordans on NikeTalk. I started to burn through freelance assignments, working deep into the night, only to wake sharply to the sound of 18-wheelers barreling past my kitchen. The windows would chatter, and brown dust would cough into my bedroom. The barren art canvases lined the carpeted edges of the walls, fencing me in like a Stonehenge of broken dreams.

  On a Monday midnight at summer’s end, my visiting friend the photographer Zach Cordner and I headed out into the night. On the other side of town, Slayer was hosting an album release party for God Hates Us All at the Hollywood Forever mortuary, and there was no passing up the opportunity to revel with Kerry King and the thrash metal band in a house of death and misery. The night itself was a blur (probably because any residue of an amusing memory was immediately blotted out by the following morning’s news). We stepped over gravestones, noted how the party was more industry than evil, greedily held on to our swag bags, and blearily returned home feeling moderately Satanist in the earl
y hours of September 11, 2001.

  The family that managed my apartment building had three police officer brothers who all lived on the floor beneath me. Their steel doors clanged behind them as their wives and children called out farewells in the throes of confusion. But they didn’t wake us. Neither did our cell phones, which were dead or on silent. Even the freeway behind us, which was more anxious than ever that morning, couldn’t rouse us as we slept off the night’s soot.

  It was my mom’s voice on the answering machine that got my attention.

  “Bobby, are you awake? Bobby, turn on the news.”

  It didn’t matter which channel, because it was the same thing on every network. A deformed New York skyline. People washing their eyes and mouths of chalky white dust. I was twenty-one and naive in 2001. But 9/11 frames this pivotal point in my life, as it does for much of the rest of the modern world. Everything before that was now frivolous and foundational—sepia toned and warm. Everything after was cutting, dipped in irony, stark, and unforgiving. It’s like the moment Biff screws everything up and sets off an alternate reality in Back to the Future Part II.

  Work-wise, I felt the effects immediately. The economy froze. Major advertisers got cold feet and withdrew from publications, so editors stopped replying, and freelance gigs dried up. I went from stitching together four or five big jobs a month to one, at best. I smudged that border between night and day and was soon finding myself waking up as people were returning home from their workdays. I lost focus, started rationing boxed spaghetti and packaged tofu, and watched a lot of Maury.

  I was disappearing.

  * * *

  AFTER 9/11, I found myself with a lot of free time. To make the most of it, I built a website. I’d picked up some HTML coding skills in college, and with the aid of the Dreamweaver web design program I created an online portfolio site under the name BobbyKim.com. If I wasn’t going to be the next big street artist, perhaps this was where I could make great art—the digital realm. Truthfully, I just needed a way to showcase my work to potential employers. I laid it out like a book, with chapters dedicated to my art, photography, and writing. The most popular page (to my six visitors), however, was the blog.

  At the turn of the millennium, the internet was still finding its footing amid primitive Tripod websites, AltaVista search queries, and Napster. But the Blogger publishing platform was a hit, providing a digital dais for outspoken, exhibitionist, attention-seeking middle children like me. Web logs (or “blogs,” as they came to be known) were open journals that could be updated with text and images. Until that point, websites were static home pages, displaying a banner here, a rotating GIF there. The only glimmer of fresh material came by way of terse news feeds. There was scant supply to browse on the web, and new content came at a glacial pace.

  By contrast, a blog was more like a coursing river. Blogs twisted and turned with each passing day’s circumstances. There was something voyeuristic about wading through a blogger’s stream of consciousness as it happened. We take this for granted today given our familiarity with social media, but blogs were the first tool to tear down the invisible wall between storyteller and audience. Back then, the prevailing media (television networks, newspapers, radio programming) controlled the flow of information. Nowadays, we are the media, and we can reach each other directly and intimately in a faster, smaller world. But none of us knew this back then.

  You know what I saw? A free alternative to zines. After all, punks already knew how to circumnavigate the publishing strongholds and media gatekeepers. Photocopied, independently made zines were the lifeblood of the hardcore scene. Being made by literally cutting and pasting xeroxed layouts between stapled sheets of paper, zines were a cheap and efficient means of disseminating information to the community, whether that be music reviews, an animal rights manifesto, or scanned Polaroids. This was what punk and hardcore adherents meant when they shouted, “DIY!”

  Do it yourself.

  Like keeping a childhood diary, I would recap my day on my blog—everything from what I ate to whom I hung out with to updates on the unbroken California weather. But I also documented outfits (back before this was—never mind, this was never cool), shared lists of sneaker releases, and posted photos of my travels and the work of artists I admired. There wasn’t an accurate means of measuring traffic, so I hadn’t a clue as to who—if anyone—was reading. I blogged for the sake of blogging, filling the gaps in my work schedule with daily updates. I was eventually writing more for my blog than for magazines and other websites and was perfectly happy with it. One day I wrote a long entry about my Evisu jeans, and a rep from the Japanese denim label emailed to thank me and say he was a fan of what I was doing. That letter sat at the top of my in-box, flagged, for months. I told myself that so long as at least one person was listening, I would be interested in talking.

  8.   RISING SON

  BUT BLOGGING DIDN’T pay the bills.1 I was tiring of the freelance life. Plus, I started to suspect that at least half of these Maury episodes were fake. Because I enjoyed writing and reducing anonymous commenters to rubble in meaningless message board arguments, a few friends suggested I apply to law school. I knew this would make my parents happy, but I also figured law could yield a steady, reliable career that would open up my nights and weekends to creative endeavors. Most of all, as a political dissident, I foresaw a subversive approach to breaking up the system. If I could work my way into the power structure through a legitimate path, maybe there was a real opportunity to make change in the world.

  I wasn’t interested in leaving Los Angeles, so I took the LSAT and applied to law schools in my area. While I waited to hear back from admissions, I joined my girlfriend, Misa, for a year in Japan, where she was teaching English to elementary school students. Her program placed her in the third-largest city of Nagoya, in the yakuza-ridden neighborhood of Imaike. In the middle of the night, I’d hear car doors slamming outside and see bands of Japanese gangsters with peanut-butter-colored hair showing up for secret meetings. While Misa was at work during the day, I bicycled downtown, met up with friends for lunch, and skated in the city center. We lived a simple life in Japan. We traveled around the country on weekends and rented English-subtitled movies from the local video store at night. Our apartment was so small that I could stand in the middle, extend my arms and legs, and touch the kitchen sink, dining room table, and bed at the same time.

  Unlike the post-9/11 landscape back home, where I was scraping for gigs, I reaped plenty of work in Japan. American street culture was burgeoning in Asia, and local magazines were hungry for stateside contributors. Alternately, the publications back home were curious about Japan’s growing street fashion scene. I reviewed Japanese rap albums by King Giddra and Rip Slyme. I documented underground fight clubs set up by drunk salarymen in the backs of cleared-out bars for Giant Robot (a relatively unknown artist at the time named David Choe illustrated my stories for the magazine).

  For one of my biggest jobs, I spent three months interviewing rappers and designers in Tokyo for a Japanzine cover story on the history of Japanese hip-hop culture. Although I detailed Scha Dara Parr’s contributions and the proliferation of Japanese B-boying, a big piece of the puzzle was acknowledging Japan’s role in sneaker-collecting culture. The vintage Nike otaku enthusiasm was exploding in tandem with the resurgence of Levi’s and Americana thrifting. Retro Air Force 1s, Dunks, and Jordans were suddenly sought-after, because the kids who wanted them in the 1980s were now young professionals and had the salaries to fulfill their fantasies. Cluttered sneaker boutiques bloomed throughout Japan’s shopping districts and eventually made their way overseas to Foot Patrol in London, Undefeated in Los Angeles, and Alife Rivington Club in New York. Sneaker culture was flourishing, but sneaker aficionados needed something to wear above the ankles—clothing that reflected their rare and expensive tastes.

  While limited American transplant labels like Stüssy and Supreme were fashionable in Japan for their exclusivity and collaborat
ions with credible artists, A Bathing Ape was drumming up the most noise out of the Harajuku neighborhood. A Bathing Ape’s logo and branding were reminiscent of what Erik Brunetti was doing in Los Angeles with his brand Fuct (namely his infatuation with Planet of the Apes), but the T-shirts were near US$90 and sold exclusively in Bape stores. Although I was first put onto Bape in college by Kevin (my editor at Stance magazine), there was a difference between seeing Ape T-shirts in eBay photographs and walking into its flagship store in the heart of Harajuku. I’d never seen a T-shirt brand like this, positioning screen-printed hoodies and trucker caps as luxe items in super-futuristic boutiques with million-dollar build-outs. The vinyl toys and tchotchkes were showcased in curved glass, while the graphic tees were framed in plexiglass cases that you’d carousel through like lithographs. The architecture firm Wonderwall had meticulously designed the Bape stores with patent leather sneakers rotating on conveyor belts beneath the floor and mirrors strategically angled to distort space and merchandise.

  At all hours, there was a steady line of customers patiently lurking outside Bape’s central Busy Works shop, which only heightened the anticipation. To shop A Bathing Ape was a privilege, and people traveled from around the world to experience it. I couldn’t help joining the queue and getting swept up in the hysteria. I also couldn’t afford anything inside, so I took mental snapshots. Bape wallets, Bape outerwear. A Pepsi collaboration with Bape camouflage cans. Co-branded pieces with Supreme. An artist project with Stash. I never looked at T-shirts and hoodies the same way after that. And as much as I was fascinated by this culture, I’d never have imagined that one day I’d be making a living from it.