As any regular reader of EMERGE will know, this blog has a strange relationship to street culture (skate, graffiti, music etc). At once excited and inspired by DIY creativity and the thriving alternative to mass produced consumer goods, we are also rather uncomfortable with the way that it's become such a bandwagon phenomenon. Every brand seems to be doing artist collaborations, limited run product and we've written more than a couple posts about the now infamous "Brand Underground" story in the New York Times back in late July.

Despite all the ambivalence, there is a lot of really interesting and exciting stuff happening in the world of street culture, from the elevation of street art not just into the legitimate art scene but into academic circles (see here for starters), the elevation of good design as a priority, and the popularization of the scene's anti-establishment ethos within a culture too quick to defer to the powers that be-politically as well as culturally.

Surveying the streetwear scene, one of the originators of the whole mini-industry that has cropped up is New York's Supreme, a high-end skate shop that has thrived off of producing smart, premium quality merchandise in limited quantities for well over a decade now. With essentially no advertising and a keen sense of the power of the Japanese market, Supreme has become the iconic street brand in EMERGE's eyes. From product collaborations with Nike, Peter Saville, Vans, and Public Enemy, plus grassroots work with scene heroes like pro skater Harold Hunter and Brand Underground figurehead A Ron The Don, Supreme has set the standard for how this whole scene operates. And they've done so without a website and without ever making it look like they are trying, which is of course the coolest way to do it.

Now that Fall is upon us once again, the interweb is abuzz with talk of Supreme's coming collection , which is sure to sell out within a couple days of dropping onto the racks of the Lafayette Street shop. Influential Japanese style blog Honeyee has announced that one part of Supreme's fall collection will be a collaborative series of skateboards done not with some big graffiti legend or hipster graphic designer, but with Jeff Koons, one of the most significant contemporary artists living and working in New York today.

It speaks to just how far above the fray Supreme is that they are looking to the artists that defined the store's SoHo environs for inspiration. Supreme exists at the very forefront of progressive brand culture, yet they have brought themselves there via a keen historical eye for far more than the low culture that dominates so much of the brand underground sensibility. The shop's logo, which riffs off of Barbara Kruger's iconic imagery suggests as much, but this high art/low art partnership between Koons and Supreme confirms it once and for all. No matter how far the street scene has come, nobody has even begun to touch Supreme in terms of inventiveness, innovation, and plain old vision.

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