Beyond all the novelty fire lighters and Rust-Oleum collaborations, Supreme has a time-worn allegiance with the subcultural proponents of the New York art scene. The label’s relationship with Harmony Korine, for example, can be traced back to 1995 when the fledgling filmmaker cast the label’s skate team in his coming-of-age classic, Kids, even tapping the store’s employees as extras. Not to mention last week’s Julia Fox lookbook, which was lensed by the filmmaker.
It’s an alliance the skate brand is revisiting with its latest capsule collection, plastering the grim, vaudevillian world of Gummo across t-shirts, basketball jerseys, hoodies, and windbreakers. One mesh t-shirt plays host to Chloë Sevigny, arms outstretched as Dot, while another memorialises the film’s most recognisable still, featuring Jacob Reynolds’ Solomon eating a plate of watered-down spaghetti in a dingy bath tub. Whether it’s Barbara Kruger or Butthole Surfers, these kinds of cult crossovers have managed to keep Supreme in orbit with counterculture – no matter how many water bottles it manages to sell.
In 1997, Korine explained the movie’s approach to costume to journalist Mike Kelly, saying “America is all about this recycling, this interpretation of pop. I want you to see these kids wearing Bone Thugs & Harmony t-shirts and Metallica hats – this almost schizophrenic identification with popular imagery. If you think about it, that’s how people relate to each other these days, through these images.” It’s perhaps fitting, then, that a new generation will cloak themselves in Korine’s imagery, yearning for that same pop cultural patriotism.
Click through the gallery above to see what’s in store and head over to Supreme to see the collection in full.