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In The Age of Fascism, Why Streetwear?
by aishamanneThese indicators of recession and fascism can be seen all around us through the trends in fashion, music, film, and art at large. Things we once discarded are returning as fresh new obsessions. Passions for rebellion and individuality are being replaced by conformity and exclusivity. In a digital landscape dominated by streamers, men and boys are increasingly drawn to misogynistic rhetoric. Women and girls are leaning into trad-wife content and celebrating narrow, conventional expressions of femininity. It seems we’re regressing to older ways of thinking that marginalized communities have spent past decades working to break down and unlearn, undoubtedly a reaction to the state of fascism in which we exist. People feel out of control—of their finances, their futures, their safety—and it’s bleeding into the ways we think, create, and relate to each other.
Of course, the state of the world also bleeds into the way we dress.
When Hoodwear Diaries began in 2021, we were having discussions around the fetishization of a specific street aesthetic: the hoodies, baggy tees, sneakers and sagging pants that had long been unfairly associated with criminality (i.e. blackness) before major luxury fashion brands adopted them as ‘new trends.’ Travyon Martin is one of many examples of how young black men were demonized for the clothes they wore, perceived as threats to public safety.
Around the time of 2020, when the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd demanded the world pay attention to the lethal impacts of anti-blackness, social justice resonated differently in culture. It was politically correct to listen to what black people had to say, to consume what we were creating.
Cultural moments like this open up space for a specific kind of vampiric fetishization that sustains white supremacy—imitation and theft positioned as allyship. If black people can look around and see ourselves in everything, how could we possibly be hated, right? The hood’s cultural DNA was the bedrock of every fashion trend (not that that’s new), and you could see it in the way every other campaign featured a rapper or was shot on a stoop.
Sure, Travyon Martin or any other young black man would be killed for wearing the kinds of clothes that luxury brands were now selling back to us as “streetwear,” but now men who looked like them were being appointed as those brands’ creative directors, so all was well. The mainstream adoption of streetwear couldn’t even be regarded as a faux “celebration of culture,” because the quiet part was never said out loud—whose culture are we celebrating?
The question of to whom streetwear belongs is a large one, and it requires there to first be a clear definition of what streetwear is (which it seems in 2025 we still haven’t arrived at yet). Regardless, the styles that dominated fashion prior to the past 2-3 years had very specific roots in the hood, which is why this project has always centered around hoodwear—studying the appropriation of “ghetto” aesthetics in fashion.
Nothing makes the necessity of specific language like “hoodwear” more glaring than the current debates around what streetwear is and isn’t. Since the luxury world adopted streetwear, it has never been clear what they mean by it. A couple of years ago, one could assume streetwear meant something like “loungewear, but make it urban*” (*in the most racially-coded sense of the word).
Today, that might be a little different. In a cultural landscape where streetwear has apparently aged up, or lost its popularity in fashion altogether, a streetwear wardrobe may include more loafers, polos and tennis skirts than hoodies and sneakers. Modern streetwear has grown “classier”; it has no room for the juvenility of the hood, in the same sense that modern femininity has no room for long nails or loud jewelry or anything outside the sphere of demurity.
In a recent episode of The Cutting Room Floor podcast, host Recho Omondi described to Noah founder Brendon Babenzien the ways that streetwear has been evolving: “The recreations that surround streetwear, whereas they used to be basketball, surfing, skating, they now feel much more polished—it’s sailing, tennis…” Babenzien interjected to decisively clarify that Noah is not a streetwear brand, much to Omondi’s confusion.
“Nothing I ever touched was ever streetwear to me,” Babenzien said. Omondi made the point that his history with Supreme, and the way that history was being discussed around the launch of Noah, undeniably connected the brand to the legacy of streetwear. But Babenzien raised an important question: just because people are calling something streetwear, does that make it accurate?
Babenzien and I are in agreement that nothing he was doing at Noah should’ve been regarded as streetwear ever; “I was making cashmere shirts and Shetland sweaters. Seriously.” And it is not lost on me that today, in the increasingly fascist climate of 2025, there is less social currency for designers to gain from aligning themselves with the streetwear category now that the hype around it has died down. However, the culture surrounding streetwear must hold itself accountable for how easily it has allowed outsiders in and the subsequent dilution of its authenticity. Instead of telling Brandon Babenzien that Noah is streetwear, we should spend more time telling people like him that their brands are not—no matter how cool it seems that they used to work at Supreme.
This kind of precision, what the kids call gatekeeping, could be the saving grace that preserves the cultural significance of streetwear and places some power into the hands of its authentic creators. But, again, to declare what streetwear isn’t would first require a shared sense of clarity about what streetwear indisputably is, and to whom it belongs.
Over here, it belongs to hip-hop. It belongs to the hood. It belongs to the youth. It belongs to rebels of any kind. It belongs to the skaters on the West Coast and the ballers on the East, and everyone in between with something to express through fashion that rejects traditional notions of formality. But in the real world, streetwear is controlled by the loudest voices backed by the largest budgets, and most of the time those voices aren’t saying much worthwhile.
Back when fashion brands were lazily remixing Kanye West’s Yeezy style and calling it streetwear, much of the clothing aligned with the aesthetics of a political climate not much unlike ours today. The Yeezy line played a colossal role in popularizing muted palettes around the mid-2010s, with those unmissable signature earth tones inspiring every other brand’s new collection. Not only were the colors copied, but Kanye’s take on streetwear could be seen through the minimalist style, oversized silhouettes, and utilitarian cuts & tones that went on to be adopted by other designers. The clothing at this time was distinctly post-apocalyptic—between Yeezy, Fear of God and Balenciaga, the mid-to-late 2010s suggested that we dress like a society of people that had survived destruction.
Today, in the midst of the 2020s, it is unclear which stage of the apocalypse we’re in. What does fashion made in the midst of destruction look like? What would streetwear look like right now if Kanye was still okay? Does streetwear even visually reflect the times anymore? Should it?
If the rise of the ‘wealthy leisure-wear’ aesthetic as streetwear is any indication, we exist in dark times. The clothes should look the way they did ten years ago, but instead modern streetwear invokes aspiration to a lifestyle that most people can’t access. In fact, the more inaccessible the lifestyle, the more desirable the aesthetic seems to become.
Of course, streetwear still has its different subsets as it always has. Not everything looks the same. Because the hype around it has changed, there hasn’t recently been a new dominant style to take the place of the widely agreed-upon “look” of streetwear. Whatever emerges next, we should be more intentional as a culture than we’ve been in the past. The next time we call something streetwear, we should be asking ourselves why.
What makes a thing streetwear? In the age of concurrent genocides, the obliteration of natural resources in service of artificial intelligence, and impending political collapse, what is the utility of ‘streetwear’—both the title and the clothes themselves?
In other words, at a time like this, what is streetwear even doing for the streets?
The only hope is that even some of the designers making clothing right now are asking themselves these questions. As consumers, a viable approach would be treating our engagement with fashion the way we should treat any other political engagement: pouring resources into the hands of those who need it most wherever possible. This means shopping with the hood, buying clothes from people you know, and immediately ceasing the desire for representation from brands doing interpretations of what the streets wear with no care for the streets.
Those obnoxiously oversized jorts will not save you, nor us.