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Streetwear and the Urban Dream

by aishamanne


The American Dream is predicated upon the ideal of the United States as a land of opportunity that “allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.” In a land where equal rights and justice are inaccessible for marginalized peoples, where non-white and non-rich groups are subjected to a lack of self-determination and freedom of destiny, where the struggle for liberation is impeded by fascism and long-lasting systems of oppression, it’s more than obvious that the American dream is not much more than an unrealized fantasy. 

This is as abundantly clear today, on the brink of 2025, as it was in 1966 when the Black Panther Party wrote their Ten-Point Program outlining the inalienable rights and desires of black people living on American soil. “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object,” the program states, “evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”


Photo of the back of a T-shirt from Grey Area Nysee, designed by Max Ragusa
 
Black people, poor people, women, people of color, queer people, and disabled people have yet to experience true liberation from this long train of abuses and usurpations. This is demonstrated from The White House, where fascist and criminal Donald Trump has been elected for yet another term as President of the United States, down to the fashion industry, where a similar fight for representation continues. 

Over the past five years, the category of streetwear in fashion experienced a boom in popularity—going from niche subculture to blending with Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Gucci, and other luxury fashion houses that previously ignored the genre only to rely on hoodies and sneakers as avenues toward connecting with the youth controlling the trends. Today, the ‘fad’ has seemingly died down. In a Highsnobiety article titled, “Streetwear has lost its popularity. Is that a good thing?” writer Tom Barker explores the apparent death of streetwear. 

The article acknowledges the ‘punk’ origins of streetwear’s ethos: “it was born from an amalgamation of skateboarding, hip-hop, graffiti, and surf culture between LA and New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The loose-fitting, graphic-heavy, casual clothes worn by these groups eventually got squeezed together and branded under the label of streetwear.” The article opts to spare the reader the lengthy history lesson of where and how streetwear came to be—which is a history that is often glossed over in discussions around the category, especially with regard to naming names and giving credit where it’s due—but it highlights that streetwear has grown into a “$200 billion industry.” 

The road to these billions is paved with the ideas and contributions of young black and brown people from New York to LA. It can be heard in the rap songs that skyrocket the net worths of creative directors just with a simple name-drop in a lyric. Hip-hop has the power to bring a brand from the runway to the streets, which is far from a backward motion: it is in the streets that power in fashion is built. Pop Smoke turned Mike Amiri into a streetwear brand through a form of self-expression that had him criminalized and surveilled in his own city. The girls from the hoods in Brooklyn turned Mackage and MCM into streetwear brands by defining their own expressions of luxury, just as the Lo Lifes did with Ralph Lauren.



Photo by Jasiah Powers (2024)

So how and why has streetwear died? 

The Highsnobiety article credits Virgil Abloh for the prediction of streetwear’s death—was he a psychic, or was his appointment at Louis Vuitton part of what killed it? And who is responsible for identifying its pulse? 

Apparently, when 1,000 Highsnobiety readers were surveyed about their thoughts on streetwear, the results indicated that most young people are more excited about art, fitness, and architecture and design than streetwear. The article concludes with the idea that streetwear was never meant to become the “‘rich man’s fetish’” (glad we’re saying that part out loud these days) that it is today. Brands like Corteiz, which recently dropped their Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huaraches with a newsstand giving out free newspapers to the masses of New York City, are being credited for bringing back the rebellious energy that makes streetwear what it is. 

But despite being “for the people,” how rebellious can streetwear be if it can now only be expressed through collaborations with major corporations? Do the streets benefit more than Nike does? If not, is it really for the people? 

Holding streetwear to a standard of being more ‘for the people’ than for the dollar may be unrealistic, since issues of class accessibility existed even before the luxury fashion industry co-opted the subculture. However, the values of hoodwear indicate that the function of what the streets wear should exist for the ultimate wellbeing of the hood. The streets love Corteiz, as illustrated by the amount of people who came outside to support Clint Ogbenna’s creative ideas. 

But Corteiz is a brand that went from being sued by Nike to collaborating with them. Whether you see that as a success story or a trap depends on your point-of-view—from the hoodwear perspective, it feels like the same stage that was set in 2019 when Virgil Abloh predicted the end of streetwear before entering the belly of the luxury beast is being set all over again. 

In a conversation with Max Ragusa, founder of streetwear brand Grey Area NYSee, we landed on an insight about why streetwear will never truly die: because the American Dream has now been replaced by “The Urban Dream.” America’s upper classes are drunken with a deep thirst for the streets and the aesthetics coming out of it. No matter what happens, what the hood wears will always be attractive, and this attractiveness will sustain a vampiric curiosity that makes the clothes on the backs of America’s Biggest Nightmares not only desirable, but profitable. 

$200 billion stands between the hood and the luxury machine. 

Before Virgil Abloh predicted streetwear’s death, he said in a 2018 032c interview titled “Duchamp is my lawyer,”: “Pyrex wasn’t fashion to me. It was like a poem: Pyrex 23, how to make it out of the hood. Either you have to be an amazing basketball player, or you have to be able to sell crack. Then you have the Caravaggio painting on the front of the shirt—the Renaissance and what it meant to the art world, the idea of light and dark. On the one hand, it’s all just a streetwear thing. On the other, it’s like 30 layers of listening to rap music and building a reference system. Pyrex is the DNA off which Off-White exists.”

America dreams of looking as cool or sounding as fly as the kids they’ve pushed into the tenement yards and underfunded schools of the hoods created by systems of oppression. The youth of these communities simply dream of making it out—and the creative expression of those dreams make them the dictators of what trends are next up. If streetwear has died, it simply means we’re all waiting for the shoe to drop in the streets. 

Architecture, art and design being currently more interesting than streetwear is a paradox, because streetwear is those things. Streetwear is what happens when the hood flips high art on its head, bringing it down from the sky to a level we can remix and make our own. As Virgil said, “A streetwear skyscraper would be horizontal. It would be a city block that’s exactly the same as the one that already existed there. The building wouldn’t get any higher, it would just get wider and develop as a community. When you go wider, there’s more opportunity for crossover.” 

What the streets wear are monuments of the Urban Dream, and as long as that exists, streetwear cannot die. The hope for 2025 is that as streetwear inevitably goes wider, the meaning of community is actualized through mutual investment—meaning the necessary slices of the $200 billion pie should go to the Max Ragusas of the hood, the ones building independently from the ground outward, rather than only to the ones who make it high up enough for Nike to benefit off of.