The Hottest Thing in Fashion Is...Local Government?
Consider this: in 2017, New York City residents gave state governor Andrew Cuomo a paltry 28% approval rating for his handling of the city's crumbling subway system. And yet, also in 2017, fans of streetwear giant Supreme lined up to cop a special Supreme edition Metro Card. The cards were later listed for as much as $130 on resale sites like Grailed. "Never has public transportation been so lit," we wrote. A year later, not much has changed. Last week, Cuomo soundly won his party primary—despite challenger Cynthia Nixon using train overcrowding and delays as a key campaign issue. And as of last fall, Supreme is worth a cool $1 billion.
Streetwear, and its origins in the youth culture of the 70s and 80s, celebrates rebellion and decoupling from institutions. Supreme hit the scene in 1994, but the movement only went mainstream once the Internet accelerated access to fashion imagery. (Much more than can fit in a zine.) With the appetite for images, demand for product followed, and a culture of rebellion became a culture of ecommerce. The contemporary hypebeast is untamable—except in their pursuit of the latest limited-edition item.
But while streetwear is perhaps inseparable from that voracious consumerism, a different side of the movement is starting to show: a nostalgia for the same civic institutions the surf, skate and hip hop cultures that established streetwear were determined to reject. Labels like OnlyNY, John Elliott and Supreme have all embraced collaborations that would have been unthinkable to streetwear's progenitors. Political cynicism may be in fashion, but its equal and opposite manifestation is a nostalgia for virtuous public institutions, real or imagined. It's KITH meets Leslie Knope. It's Civicore.
Lower East Side brand OnlyNY has amassed nearly 150K Instagram followers and the support of pop figures like Charlotte Day Wilson and Portugal The Man by distinguishing itself through a licensing deal that allows the brand to sell homages to New York City parks, the Department of Transportation (DOT), and NYC Sanitation, among others. The clothing is comfortable, but detailed. The aglet of their drawstring bottoms reads 'OnlyNY' in font that could fit on a grain of rice. The five-point leaf of the New York City parks logo is a particularly popular motif. Their forest-green Parks hoodie was recently restocked after selling out, and I know a Brooklyn couple in a silent war over who gets to wear the baseball hat version. A fellow writer recently spotted my OnlyNY tote after a comedy show and lamented that he left his NYC Parks shirt in Paris.
It's not hard to see the irony here: OnlyNY has built a brand around selling New York City subway merch to consumers whose personal Twitter brands revolve around hating the L train. The prevailing message seems to be that the only good institutions are the ones nostalgia manufactures. It doesn't matter that there is no such neighborhood program as Stanton Street Sports. The medium is the message.
Last week, John Elliott announced a long term partnership with the City of Los Angeles, subsequently showing LA-branded sweats at NYFW. The desire to pay tribute to a city's public details (rather than private labels)– right down to a particular climbing rock– is a form of urban environmentalism, an answer to gorpcore that celebrates the mounting of the Jay Street escalators like others might memorialize climbing Mount Washington. A Boston hypebeast could similarly telegraph their survival of The Big Dig—if anyone in Boston had a sense of personal style.
From a business perspective, the cities of Los Angeles and New York might own the intellectual property for their public spaces, but they would never be able to gain fashion credibility without collaboration. Perhaps the New York Transit Museum Store just hasn't reached a tipping point with the Grailed crowd. However, it's more likely that through Civicore this symbiotic relationship will continue, as enterprising creatives allow institutional language to take aesthetic flight.
After all, we are in the age of the idiot Interior Secretary. The age of the National Parks Dad Hat. We are living post-Postal Service profitability, five years after the ailing institution thought they might get into the merch game themselves.
Trump's Space Force logos are a race to the bottom at the same time Virgil Abloh collaborator Heron Preston has a new collection with NASA. The six potential Space Force logos were mocked for being childish, busy and confusing. But then again—so is the graphic vocabulary of streetwear in 2018. As cult brands like Online Ceramics offer up a combination of Dead Head iconography, post-dot com vaporwave aesthetics, and the fever-dream gothic fonts, is it any wonder that OnlyNY has opted for the comparatively minimal subway signage of Massimo Vignelli?
Even if the romanticization of civic institutions at the hands of streetwear—aka Civicore—isn't an earnest attempt to stem the trauma of democratic collapse it's slowed the homogenization of the streetwear identity. Instead of a pan-city of digital natives subsisting on SoundCloud links and Chipotle we can pause to remember that New York is not Los Angeles is not Boston or Chicago or Seattle. Through its regional specificity, Civicore distinguishes itself from brands like Urban Outfitters, where the sheer number of cultural references make a shopper feel like she's playing millennial bingo.
OnlyNY and Supreme have even found ways to incorporate the so-called Fourth Estate, with New York Magazine and New York Post collaborations, respectively—the standout of the New York Magazine collection being a t-shirt which proclaims 'A Gentile's Guide To Jewish Food' around a fish sandwiched inside a bagel. (If that doesn't sound like a civic issue, you weren't following the governor's primary.) These sartorial nods alone will not save the media industry, or necessarily get people to the polls—Bears Ears National Monument and Social Security exist on borrowed time, and Civicore can't fix that. But the trend does reframe style as an exercise in civic observance. When the seal of the City of Los Angeles is on your back, you're a citizen.
More than anything, Civicore makes me think back to my high school days. I wanted to be Property of Abercrombie & Fitch and Established in 1892. I wanted to be a member of the Hollister Surf Team. I wanted to belong to my high school, so I ordered a rugby shirt with crossed field hockey sticks and my name on the back. These days, I wish to be branded by my surroundings. Maybe this is the best way to think of Civicore: as perhaps the natural outgrowth of a generation that grew up wanting to be part of something (as our parents were busy celebrating our individuality).
We can't help but be owned by bureaucrats, cabinet officers, and shadowy departments. We can't help but ride on crumbling rails. But we can liberate ourselves, Civicore suggests, through our imagination. Dressing not for the city we have, but the city we want.
