Jim Jones Is Still Salty About That Supreme Tee
Apparently, Jim Jones still wants a piece of Supreme. In a recent Instagram post, the OG Dipset member argued the skate-wear company took advantage of him and Juelz Santana when the brand paid them an apparently paltry $14,000 to pose for their iconic 2006 portrait tee. “They owe us piece of th [sic] company,” Jones wrote on Instagram. “Rappers n my black people had no idea wht Supreme was…they new who dipset was lol.” It’s true that, in 2006, nearly everyone knew about Dipset: The legendary New York crew had just released Cam'ron's Killa Season and Jones's own inescapable “We Fly High.” So Jones and Santana were a major get for the streetwear label, which, while popular, was a far cry from the billion-dollar behemoth it's since become: The collaboration resulted in what Complex called “one of the greatest, if not the greatest T-shirts in streetwear history.” These days, we take the bridge between skate and hip-hop for granted. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that this tee helped build it.
This isn’t the first time Jim Jones has expressed ambivalence or even straight-up regret about how he handled his deal with Supreme, though. On the 10-year anniversary of the shirt’s release, Jones vacillated between respectful praise and resentful bitterness in that same Complex interview: “Supreme has taken off 100 times stronger than 10 years ago, and I tip my hat to them ’cause they really a dope-ass brand in the way they do their business.” Though he admitted that neither he nor Santana had heard of the skate brand at the time, it’s clear he’s since spent a lot of time thinking about the box-logo giant, and the effect his image might have had on its popularity.
Supreme’s celebrity portrait tees are holy-grail collector's items for streetwear fans, and every new release sparks a frenzy. Scores of seminal musicians have worn the box logo since 2006—Nas, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Slick Rick, Neil Young, Bad Brains, Gucci Mane, and Morrissey among them. The Smiths frontman has since denounced his collaboration with the brand, but for different reasons: First, he hated Terry Richardson's “enfeebled photograph…fit only for a medical encyclopedia." And second, the famously meat-free Morrissey hadn’t realized Supreme “were sponsored in part by the beef-sandwich pharaoh known as White Castle.” Morrissey offered to return his “substantial" fee in exchange for Supreme burying the T-shirt, but no dice.
And that’s kind of the rub: When Supreme shoots you for a portrait, you get a one-time fee, a shot at streetwear immortality, and that's about it. There’s no licensing, no residuals, no back-end percentages. And Supreme is pretty touchy when it comes to maintaining ownership over their images and branding. (Collaborations, like the brand’s recent drop with Louis Vuitton, are a different story.) Dipset might have been the second addition to Supreme’s portrait-T-shirt canon (the first was Raekwon and a Tickle Me Elmo a year earlier), but Jones isn’t going to get a piece of Supreme anytime soon.
