This Secret Supreme Collaboration Is a $3,500 Commentary on Resellers
In 2023, Supreme and Bless quietly issued one of the year's coolest collaborations. Not because it was particularly splashy but because it was the exact sort of thoughtfully cool team-up that felt like vintage Supreme: Insider-y, culturally conscious, free of hype.
"BLESSSUPREME Aftersellers," Bless and Supreme's second partnership, is such a modest affair that most Supreme shoppers will likely never know it exists.
That's partially because it's being sold exclusively in Japan but also because it's classic Bless — and priced as such.
Here, the fashion-adjacent German label has remixed various deadstock items from its first Supreme collection into fresh shapes and styles indicative of its creative lingo.
There's a jacket whose sleeves have been made detachable and now may be worn independently of the outer layer. There's a Bless and Supreme-branded tee that's been sliced apart and pieced back together with a woven mesh panel. Another wears a permanently attached pearl necklace.
And it's all priced from ¥83,600 to ¥537,900 (about $550 to $3,550), the most affordable item being a reprinted T-shirt that sells for ¥53,900 ($356).
BLESSSUPREME Aftersellers is exclusively stocked by high-end Japanese boutiques that typically sell labels like Bless or luxury streetwear, like Dover Street Market Ginza, GR8, SUPER A MARKET, Addition Adelaide, and so on. And, as the collection's implies, it's likely a commentary on the proposition of streetwear resale, where ordinary items are flipped for exorbitant sums simply because scarcity = money.
Except, here, the brands making those items have the last laugh.
This is a very Bless idea. Bless has long cut against fashion's grain, operating less like a fashion house than as an outlet for its artist-turned-designer-ish founders, Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag.
Heiss and Kaag's oeuvre typically prompts viewers to question the nature of what they're confronted with, be it a sauna-outfitted sedan or a wood-wearing charging cable. Is it art? Is it fashion? Is architecture? All? Neither? Heck, what even is art? And does it matter when the resulting thing is this cool/weird/fun?
Bless' Supreme collaboration and subsequent Fendi partnership reflect a hard-won global admiration earned over three decades of singular experimentation and partnership with similar thinkers like Martin Margiela. This second Supreme collection feels like Bless expressly toying with the notion that it even teamed up with the world's most famous streetwear brand at all, one whose own resale values have mostly declined in recent years.
Yes, Supreme is so big now that its collaborations are often more pop than culture. Some of its bigger Spring/Summer 2025 collaborations include SpongeBob SquarePants and Damien Hirst, for instance.
But Supreme's cultural cache is, to some degree, impossible to kill. Even as it jumps the streetwear shark, it retains some of the IYKYK clout that always gave it an edge over its many imitators.
That residual cool is what continues to connect Supreme with genuinely cool people like Tyler, the Creator and Martine Rose. And, of course, Bless.
