As part of SHOWstudio’s coverage of INNERSECT, Editor-at-Large Lou Stoppard hosted a Live Panel Discussion focusing on the importance of creative collaboration. Stoppard was joined by a selection of SHOWstudio favourites and industry experts; No Vacancy Inn’s Tremaine Emory, Ambush’s Yoon Ahn, ALYX’s Matthew Williams and founder of INNERSECT himself, Edison Chen. Watch this line-up discuss the prevalence of collaborations within the street-culture and the increasing influence of music merging with fashion.
Shoppers standing in line to get into a Supreme store in Tokyo. For many, the lure is as often the wait as the wares. Andrew Faulk for The New York Times
Theolus Jackson slouched against the stanchion separating him from the entrance of Supreme, the streetwear emporium on Lafayette Street in SoHo. He had registered on the company’s website to pick up a ticket assuring him a spot near the head of a line that by 10 a.m. that day spooled around the corner toward Broadway.
Wearing loose trousers, a football jersey and earbuds, he bided his time. “Most of the time I have my music, so I’m not bothered,” Mr. Jackson said. “I come every week — I like the vibe — and I just chill.”
The ostensible draw for Mr. Jackson and his comrades on that balmy June morning, the so-called drop prompting a couple of hundred fashion die-hards to snap open their wallets, was a jacket ($298) and companion shirt ($158), stamped with the image of a Richard Prince-inspired cowpoke, which sold out within moments after 11, when Supreme opened its doors.
Did it matter? Not much. Though upmarket streetwear — hoodies, sneakers, skateboards, ball caps, sanitation-worker boiler suits — is the ostensible lure for these hunter-gatherers, the wares are just part of the draw.
“These kids don’t come to go into the store,” said Jeff Carvalho, the executive editor of Highsnobiety, a content-and-commerce website and magazine focused on high-end streetwear. “They want to be in the line.” Casting an appraising eye on the restive Thursday morning scene, he drove home the point.
“The line is the new community,” Mr. Carvalho said. “When 200 to 300 kids are lining up outside of a store, it’s because they want to be part of something.”
Mr. Carvalho and Jian DeLeon, Highsnobiety’s editorial director, make it their business to monitor the weekly drops at emporiums like Supreme, Nike Lab and Palace, the London-based skate-fashion store with a new outpost in New York.
On this day, they had offered themselves as field guides to what promised be a highly engaging hybrid of tribal rite and street theater, a latter-day alterative to the once-ubiquitous bands of adolescents raucously swarming malls.
“Come get your number — hurry before they pass you over,” a gangly guy in a tank top yelled to a companion. “You only have a certain amount of grace period.”
Like other fans of the streetwear brand, Kenta Kashiuagi shows off his reward in Tokyo: a new Supreme T-shirt. Andrew Faulk for The New York Times
His shouts and those of companions volleying from one end of the street to the other pricked up the ears of hypervigilant store personnel ready to pounce on infractions.
Glancing at them furtively, one petitioner stammered: “I can’t talk to you. I’m going to get thrown off the line.”
But overbearing security and a building sense of pressure did not seem to ruffle the mood. For many of these strivers, the chance to swap insider intelligence and bask in camaraderie was, after all, the point.
“Those things make the kids more agreeable to doing something that on surface you think is a sort of absurd proposition,” said Noah Callahan-Bever, the editor of Complex, an online youth-culture magazine that has chronicled the evolution of the line phenomenon in a series of videos.
Absurd, for sure, when a “luxury” recliner can be reserved at the multiplex on an app like Fandango, and a puffer coat from Vetements summoned at a click at ssense.com, rendering the queue all but obsolete.
Jay Hines, a fashion stylist, talking to shoppers outside Supreme’s London location. Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times
Yet the line persists, a global trend stretching these days from Tokyo to Tucson and Berlin to the Bronx. Its members, millennials and their younger Gen Z kin, share a mind-set, making common cause of a yen for authenticity. What’s more, they defy facile stereotyping.
“One time I saw a guy with a three-piece suit,” Mr. DeLeon said. “He was wearing immaculate Moscot tortoiseshell glasses. He told me, ‘I’m a lawyer meeting with a client, but I want first to get a sweatshirt here.’”
A mere half-dozen years ago, a shared lust for skateboard and locker-room gear sustained the community. “A limited-edition sneaker was so rare that when two people were wearing it, you knew something connected them — certain music, certain art, certain fashion,” said David Fischer, Highsnobiety’s Berlin-based chief executive. But time, as he noted, wrought changes.
Today, the queue is partly a resellers’ market: energetic young entrepreneurs snapping up wares in multiples, then flipping them at soaring markups on eBay or selling them for pocket change to finance their own buys. On this day, the spirit of commerce was lively on Lafayette Street, with vans lining the far side of the block, the trunks popped to display boxes and bags packed with limited-edition inventory from Nike, Supreme and other vendors — a lure for passers-by.
“Reselling, it’s an easy way to make money,” said a tank-top-garbed youth who goes by the street name Young Sin. “I do this every Thursday. You can’t get locked up for it.” Young Sin, Y S to his friends, planned to pick up a cap for himself and offer additional, marked-up items to all comers.
“I like Supreme,” he said, shrugging, “but they could be Old Navy as long as it helps pay my rent.”
For many others, though, the wait itself is sufficient reward. Some could have taken a page from Andy Warhol, who observed in his loosely structured 1975 memoir, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” that lining up for movie tickets offered distinct pleasures. “The possibility of never getting in is exciting,” Warhol mused. “But after that, waiting to get in is the most exciting.”
Traveling in packs has additional perks. “The death of the shopping center has created this void in kids’ lives,” Mr. Callahan-Bever said. “It’s being filled in part by this society of kids, some known to each other only from the internet, all of them into this niche product that acts as a social identifier. For them, standing in line for a T-shirt or baseball cap is a way of telling the world that you know about something that not everyone is hip to.”
Professed connoisseurs, plenty of these queuers like the kick of the chase. “You can’t find this stuff at Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s,” said a 40-something, suede-clad man at Supreme, too press-shy to provide his name. “I like the exclusiveness of people always seeing me and saying, ‘Wow.’ It’s kind of like being a movie star.”
As David Andrews noted playfully in his 2015 pop culture rumination, “Why Does the Other Line Always Move Faster?”: “I can attest to the sense of togetherness that sometimes develops with the strangers around you in line.”
Shoppers standing in line along Lafayette Street to get into Supreme’s SoHo store. Jackie Molloy for The New York Times
“We become a little band of survivors, with a grim gallows humor to match,” Mr. Andrews wrote. “We’re all in this together.”
Will Gamble, a student at the University of Exeter, is a regular at Supreme’s weekly drops in London. “The line,” he said, “is quite a sociable thing. I’ve made friends purely from going to Supreme every week and seeing what’s going on.”
Shared interests with his queuing companions vary from gallery hopping to sports to music. “We’re big fans of Radiohead, and we like a bit of art,” said Mr. Gamble, the preening owner of a “pill shirt,” a Supreme item influenced by a signature artwork by Damien Hirst.
“I meet up with one of my friends,” he said. “We wait, we take photos — it’s almost the whole day.”
What, after all, is the point of the wait if you can’t share? As Mr. Fischer, at 38 an old hand in this unlikely ritual, views it, “Standing in line and finally getting the product, that’s only one exciting part of the cycle.”
The peak experience: going social with your trophy.
“Once you have it,” he said, “you get to snap it a couple of times on Instagram.”
At a recent seminar for a business school’s executive program, I recounted some stories about workplace transformations. Each resulted from a dramatic increase in the involvement and self esteem of front-line employees. I expressed astonishment at the apparently limitless skills of even older workers in union settings, once they were allowed to “own” (psychologically, that is) their 25 or 250 square feet of the workplace. I fumed at our detached, machine-like models of organization that are hindering such transformations.
Upon conclusion, my dean-host thanked me genuinely for my thorough explication of the “emotional side of management.” He might as well have slapped me in the face. I was dumbfounded. But I shouldn’t have been, because for decades we have aspired to “professionalize” management. The new-look (circa 1950) manager is no hip-shooter, and management is not to be viewed as a second-class discipline. We applaud detachment and rationality. We aspire to perfectable “administrative science,” which its most devout adherents hope will assume a lofty place next to physics and biology.
All of this is wrongheaded. Management is not about administration. It is about emotion. Management requires empowering people on the basketball court or in the meatpacking plant to achieve continuous personal growth. Consider several elements of the business equation.
QUALITY. Effective leadership in quality improvement is moral, not statistical. Statistics, training for everyone, and systems are essential to quality improvement. But more important are care and love of the product or service. Quality is as much about aesthetics (design, for instance) and customers’ perception as it is about technical specifications. To achieve matchless quality, management must be emotionally attached to the product and must pass on their enthusiasm to every employee, distributor, and supplier—as well as the customer. I can’t imagine unemotional quality-centered management any more than I can imagine an Olympic-level skier who hates snow and skiing.
SERVICE. Service, too, should be measured and quantified; we don’t do enough of that. But service is principally about intangible product traits and the painstaking construction of long-term customer relationships. A recent Wall Street Journal story described Pratt & Whitney’s loss of leadership in aircraft engines to General Electric. P&W’s aircraft engines are about as good as GE’s, but, over time, P&W became less attentive to customers’ nontechnical needs.
INNOVATION. Fostering innovation depends on the percent of gross revenue devoted to research and development, as well as scientists’ educational credentials. But that’s about 10 percent of the story. More important, innovation success depends upon listening intently to the needs of innovative customers. It also is a product of the company’s ability to nurture committed champions. Innovation, a low probability affair, comes less from a great “technical strategy” than from irrationally dedicated new-product or service teams.
PEOPLE. Thoroughgoing “people programs” include progressive monetary incentives and brilliant training curricula; we are woefully deficient on both scores. However, more important are respect, trust, a sense of partnership between union and management where applicable, a belief in the virtually unlimited potential of every person and a willingness to let go of debilitating controls. Specifically, we must realize, for instance, that superb training is not so much a button-down curriculum delivered in million- dollar classrooms as it is a commitment to lifelong learning by all.
LEADERSHIP. What is leadership? Good strategic planning? Financial wizardry? Both. But more to the point are intensity, involvement, the ability to create and bring to life an inspiring vision, a belief in the product and genuine enthusiasm for the work of the front-line bench scientist or checkout clerk. The chief criterion for managerial promotion should be the degree to which a candidate takes his or her greatest pleasure in helping others develop and grow.
Across the board, then, it turns out that the essence of management is its emotional side. The legendary General George Patton is purported to have said, “I’d much prefer an OK plan executed with uncommon vigor right now to the ‘perfect plan,’ executed in a humdrum fashion next week.” Likewise, a landmark Harvard Business Review article
by consultant Amar Bhide, titled, “Hustle as Strategy,” concluded that vigor in execution is more important than excellence in strategic positioning in determining business success.
James Gleick’s bestselling book, Chaos, chides hard science for having ignored the “nonlinear,” or messy, parts of natural phenomena. It turns out that traditional, linear models explain a surprisingly small part of reality. So too with our misleading pursuit of a linear administrative science. What management now needs, which the practitioners of chaos are starting to provide for the hard sciences, is to attend to the irregularly shaped pieces of the business puzzle—people, emotion, and implementation.
As a practical first step, consider shifting your reading agenda strongly toward fiction. Ironically, most nonfiction ends up preserving the fiction of an emotionless, linear world, while fiction examines the non-linearity of real people who determine the real-world course of our organizations.
