r/Supreme Is Going To Melt Down
No one is more critical of Supreme than people who love Supreme. Such is the nature of streetwear: the lows are low and the highs are high. Right now, Supreme is on a high, swerving a longstanding slump with one objectively excellent collection earlier this year and another coming up in just about a month.
Good times. Unless you're former Supreme chief creative officer Erin Magee, in which case: weird times. But also good times.
Because Magee almost immediately followed her late-August departure from Supreme by joining Kim Kardashian's shapewear titan SKIMS the following week. And like with everything Supreme, nothing is so simple.
Initially, Magee's departure from Supreme was lowkey. No press release, as per usual with Supreme, just an Instagram post on Magee's personal account. But, after it was noticed by the Supreme disciples on r/SupremeClothing — the more obvious r/Supreme is reportedly a "dumpster fire." — it was summarily picked apart by the rest of the internet. (Highsnobiety has reached out to Magee for comment.) Because it's Supreme.
Now, I'm the first to admit that it's easy to come for the king. I've never received as much pushback (or support, frankly) for anything I've ever written as I did when I declared Supreme dead a few years ago. I was correct, of course: "Supreme is dead" has been a meme in the streetwear space since even before Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future boosted its visibility in the early '10s but, by the early '20s, Supreme felt especially inessential.
A combo of waning hype — perhaps spurred by reshuffling parent companies — and buzzy young challengers loosened Supreme's grip on the culture enough that labels like Stüssy and MSCHF leapt ahead. Then-creative-director Tremaine Emory departed after only a year, citing "systemic racism." Would-be big collabs with brands like The North Face sat on digital shelves, which would've sounded absurd five or six years prior. And Supreme, the quintessential hyped clothing label, possibly losing its vitality was newsworthy.
Magee saw Supreme through it all. She joined Supreme in 2004 and guided it to its highest highs — Supreme was the pinnacle of streetwear culture and, really, fashion at large in the early '10s — and through its lowest lows. (She also presciently founded street-leaning womenswear label MadeMe in 2007.) Appropriate that as SKIMS' first-ever chief design officer, Magee will "cover design and creative product direction across Skims’ growing categories and markets," according to WWD.
Don't expect that nuance from the discourse.
On Reddit and the other platforms that discussed Magee's departure, commenters were torn between acknowledging her impressively long tenure, complaining that the Supreme staffers spotlighted in Magee's group photo don't look like "skaters," and observing a visible lack of diversity in the same photo, calling back to Emory's reason for leaving the company.
This is was always the fated result, because this is Supreme. News of the woman who helped turn Supreme into a cultural juggernaut applying that same skillset to Kim Kardashian's activewear brand will likely not make the same splash as news of her leaving Supreme, because this latest story is only Supreme-adjacent. But it's already being picked up and duly covered by the usual suspects because, well, we are talking about Supreme.
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