Clothing brands once familiar to only the most fashionable are becoming billion-dollar industry titans, and ASU students are taking notice and turning a profit. Fashion-forward students around ASU’s campus often showcase and resell clothing from brands such as Supreme, Burberry, Comme De Garçons, Off-White, PALACE and more.
Supreme started out as a small skate company and following a sale of 50 percent of its business to the Carlyle Group, is now worth more than a billion dollars, according to GQ Magazine. Despite its financial growth, the brand's street credibility has remained the same. Students are tuning into drops and following resold items.
Intermedia studies junior Conner Jensen has been buying and selling clothes from brands such as Supreme and Fucking Awesome for about three years. He sells through Twitter and Grailed, a community online marketplace for men's fashion.
Jensen has also sold and exchanged items to Tempe resale store Wang’s Closet. Wang's Closet also offers store credit if students want to sell and buy other items from the store's collection of brands.
Freshman finance major Victor Diaz has resold streetwear brands since 2014 and bought Supreme clothes since 2012. He usually sells through Twitter and Instagram to people around the country.
The buying process for drops — the industry term for limited releases of a brand's items — tends to be extensive for serious buyers and resellers.
“I get up maybe 20 minutes before a drop. I make sure everything is inputted correctly, and I check the read-ins,” Diaz said. “I just prepare myself and find information on what items sell out quicker, for example, in England I figure out where items will be on the website and find pictures from the UK site. I find out where the items will be on the page in order to buy them as quickly as possible.”
Jensen said it's almost impossible to buy Supreme's signature box logo shirts without using a bot that automates the buying process. A lot of "hardcore" resellers use bots in order to retrieve desired clothing items quicker, he said.
“One box logo from ‘97 is reselling for about $4,000 because of how old it is and the rarity of it. There’s no repetition (in design) in the sense that the shirts will be the same color the next year that's why people want these items,” Jensen said.
“The t-shirts are all screen-printed and with every t-shirt over time the screen-printing will start to crack and the colors will start to fade so the value deteriorates,” Jensen said.
Marketing and global politics senior Austin Griblin is the creative director of the Business of Fashion club at ASU and recently visited New York to attend New York Fashion Week.
He is completing an honors thesis about creative marketing tactics used in the fashion industry to differentiate brands from one another.
“My research was basically attending New York Fashion Week and observing, recording and seeing the various events that they usually throw to promote brands,” Griblin said. “It was interesting to see how brands communicate to the consumers during such a holiday of sorts that is New York Fashion Week.”
Griblin attended a few runway shows and other NYFW events due to his connections through the club.
Griblin said that he was able to experience hypebeast culture in an interesting way when he was waiting in line to view skate brand PALACE's new spring collection. He said there was a security guard at the door letting in a few groups at a time. There was a line formed by barricades that wrapped all around the street.
“I wanted to grab a Forrest Gump (t-shirt) and after waiting for 15 minutes in the cold I definitely decided to back out,” Griblin said. “I walked around the street and there was a guy coming out with a bunch of bags, and he told me that he got pretty much everything because he is a reseller. I asked him if I could buy the Forrest Gump (t-shirt) that he had just bought. He sold it to me for $80, which is more than half the retail price.”
More luxury clothing brands are making their way into streetwear culture by collaborating with different companies. Last year Burberry collaborated with Russian streetwear brand Gosha Rubchinskiy and was able to expand its audience, and Supreme's collaboration with Louis Vuitton was also well-received. Other brands like Ralph Lauren and Gucci are entering the culture as well.
Griblin said he believes that these luxury brands are adopting streetwear culture in order to increase demand for their products.
Reach the reporter at jlmyer10@asu.edu or follow @jessiemy94 on Twitter.
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