How Streetwear Became All About the #Hustle

Kith is the 8-year-old store turned in-house streetwear brand owned by Ronnie Fieg, who has come to serve as not quite a spokesman for the current streetwear movement (or bubble, if you’re feeling cynical), but as a sort of representative figure of its transformation. He opened his store just as streetwear was bubbling above the counterculture, and has masterminded accessible versions of its most disruptive transformations. Among the things he’s passed through his filter: a less culty version of the drop model that Supreme innovated; the fun of waiting in line for clothes; and the art of the collab, which last night included a dizzying lineup of brands: Vogue, Bergdorf Goodman, Asics, Rhude, Manolo Blahnik, Disney, the low-key British streetwear brand Ashley Williams, MSBHV, and, most brilliantly of all, the glossy power player sushi canteen Nobu.

Fieg makes what you might consider stripped-down streetwear, a kind without the secret language that’s implied in a Stüssy graphic or a Supreme collaboration; his own designs represent “what’s missing in my closet, straight up,” he told GQ last year. Last night, in a collection dubbed “Kith Air,” there were lots of shorts, flannels, jean jackets, hoodies, sweatpants, a ton of sneakers—luxury basics for people who are luxury basics, plus some chest-rig-esque bags with two oblong pouches, like a pair of lungs primed for a Juul’s vapor.

People who either lived through the original streetwear wave of the early ’90s that gave birth to brands like Supreme, Fuct, and Stüssy, or who just grew up worshipping it, often have trouble squaring Kith, plus the likes of Amiri, Palm Angels, and even Off-White, with their old-school streetwear. (It’s worth pointing out that a lot of those people are Gen X’ers, for whom corporatization is the original sin that got Adam and Eve expelled from the skatepark that would be their Eden. Whatever.) “Our thing,” Supreme founder James Jebbia told GQ earlier this year, “was to try and make things as good as the best brands out there—but not the fashion brands—and have that quality that people are going to wear these items for a long, long time.” Streetwear was originally for people (kids, really) who wanted well-designed, modestly priced, simple, loosely cut clothes they could run around and skate in. They were clothes for hanging out.

Streetwear now stands for exactly the opposite. “Let me make something very clear,” Fieg said last year. “I’m not hanging out, ever. I’m working 14-, 15-hour days.” The clothes on the runway Thursday night—somewhere between Fieg’s desert and Paris, I thought—make up the wardrobe of influencers, of multi-hyphenates always on the go, whose only reliable routine is #thehustle. Maybe Kith’s customers are hanging out on Howard Street or outside Fieg’s Noho store, but make no mistake: They’re never off the clock.

As Fieg pointed to with this collection, air travel has become the billion-dollar sweet spot where streetwear and influencer culture meet. Since he launched Off-White in 2012, Virgil Abloh has made air travel one of his signatures—not for his corporate brand, but for his personal one, filling his Instagram with dispatches from flights between DJ gigs, inspo meetings, and fashion shows, glamorizing the nonstop grind more typical of a corporate consultant into the enviable lifestyle of an international fashion and music superstar. Surely the boom in this type of streetwear can be attributed in part to the feeling that millennials have to build a personal brand in order to make it in the world, since you can no longer rely on a corporate job for stability, and living a freelancer’s lifestyle requires you to materialize overnight wherever your clout is needed.

Among the things the original wave of streetwear brands stood for was cool, a quality whose scalability is dubious. (Supreme has certainly done it, but they didn’t set out with ambitions of world domination, as some of these “big streetwear” brands did.) The archetypal streetwear customer morphed swiftly in the past decade from a guy-behind-the-guy figure with taste and credentials, whispering their secrets into the ear of the mass market, into…the guy who stands in for those things rather than standing for them. The aspirational-streetwear lifestyle requires clothes that will make you feel comfortable and look hot on a plane—even if the plane is just one conjured by “video-immersive settings.”