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Alight, I'm going to be an adult for the moment and actually address this once, before I dismiss you with some "go be trill" remark.
If I'm delusional, then answer my question - why did North Face jump off in mainstrteam the late 90s, after having existed for 30+ years withoiut ever having been worn casually as a mainstream fashion brand? Is it a coincidence that everything that was being flammed by "the hood" in the early-to-mid 90s - from AF1s to technical ski wear, and beyond - became widely popular and mainstream a few years later, as the music and culture that relfected that life became more commercialized and broadcast to a much wider, national (and suburban) audience?
Was that all just one bizarre coincidence, one which repeated itself over and over with several different brands and looks?
The fashion that was made popular in the early 90s in NYC remained the blueprint and chief influence of urban fashion for decades since.
Nowadays, Kanye is a style icon, right? Look at the man who built his style. Look at his TISA bear collections. Him being on the "cuttting edge" back in the day was really nothing more than having an idea of what was going on on the opposite coast before the internet and information super highway made everything paint by number.
Nowadays, "style" is thrust upon the populace. There are people who create culture, and people who consume it - one of the major venues through which this is done, especially for the more urban demographic is music. So, 2010 (or whatever) Jay-Z get on a track and says, "New watch alert - Hublots" and people run to google to find out what that is. In fact, Jay-Z was actually one of the first urban artists to flip the paradigm and start telling his listeners what was hot - creating a chasm between him and them. "While you thumb through The Source, I read the Robb Report."
But, that wasn't always the case. If you listen to old crotchedly baseball fans (as opposed to old crotchedy urban fashion and culture gurus like myself), you'll hear them talk about a day when baseball players used to be "among the people." They worked regular jobs in the offseason. They frequented local watering holes with little overall fanfare. They were basically just like everybhody else. Well, that's what "hip hop" used to be like too. Rappers and athletes, etc. didn't "feed" the streets (the early-adopters) style, brands, or the like. They were just dudes. The machinations of "celebrity" hadn't yet taken hold in the community. So, their appeal was mostly regional - and they didn't tell people what was cool, because they were talking to their peers. The fans looked like the rappers because there wasn't much difference between them, not because the people consuming the culture longed to emulate those creating and marketing the culture. Starting in the mid-90s, the marketing of urban culture soared to new heights and it started producing celebrities on a volume and scope that it hadn't before. As part of that rise, their style - which was simply that of their regions and peers - got exported to the rest of the world. As those more foreign to the lifestyle became consumers, they got infatuated and wanted to look like their new counterculture heros. But, in reality, that just meant looking like the people who were native to what the now-famous celebrities were doing all along. So, the world started dressing like "the hood."
Nowadays, it's a top-down mentality. Not only has the gap between celeb and fan grown exponentially, allowing the celeb to "be on" stuff that is beyond the access of the consumers, but half of the artists have brands themselves that they are trying to push on their fans. So, it's one way communication, whereas in the past it was much more bottom-up, and grass roots, in terms of how styles took hold in the urban cultural landscape. Fat Joe's "560" was actually the first attempt at this that I saw. The world wasn't really ready yet. Wu Wear was the next attempt. The world still wasn't really ready - had the internet been mainsteam, it would have taken off like crazy. Then we saw the Sean Johns and Roc-a-wears, which were commerically successful, but were not taken seriously by the urban dudes known for getting fly. Part of this reason is exactly the gap I mentioned before - a rapper couldn't tell us what to wear, or sell his coolness to us. That had to happen organically, and we knew these guys long before they was famous - the allure and aura the brands relied upon to sell just didn't pass the sniff test to us.
Fast forward to today, and everything is a lot more shrewd. In addition to having years of beating people into the idea of these people as style icons, a lot of people from the previous eras departed from, or became less visible and audible in the culture. So, we know when people are falling for the okey doke, but our voice wasn't dominant, so we don't always speak on it, or get heard when we do. Further, the idea of endorsements and product-placement, and marketing is a lot more behind the scenes. The culture learned that the consumers aren't THAT pathetic - they don't want to wear a shirt that says Kanye West on it (the Wu Wear model), they want to feel like THEY are leading the movement, even though they are being spoonfed. So, most of the art of influecing acts more subtle and behind the scenes; it's more subtle, but way more deliberate.
But, make no mistake, when all this started to go mainsteam, it was essentially taking the style of golden era dipped in NYC and taking it global. And, the rest of the world spent years catching up. The people getting the most famous and becoming most visible when the culture broke through and gained new spheres on influence were predominantly from NYC - so that's why it was our look that become the blueprint. ...If the momentum the West Coast had in the early 90s had been sustained, it would have been khakis and Chucks that the soccer moms of the fly over states would be getting begged by their kids to buy. But, the East was dominant at the time and NYC was the epicenter, so it was North Face, Air Force ones, etc.
...You wanna refute this go ahead. Propose an alternate theory. I'm all ears.
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Let these slip through my fingers too many times. And funnily enough, a few minutes after this bid ended, a buyer purchased my pair of Military Blue 4's, which I had listed for more than these anyways.
