Don't Supreme & Number (N)ine Deserve Each Other?
10 years ago, a Supreme and Number (N)ine collaboration would've already been a little late. Even in 2025, their combined residual clout makes the partnership an obvious standout of Supreme's Fall/Winter 2025 collection, which releases in the coming weeks.
It's just that this brand-new collaboration already feels quite dated. Supreme and Number (N)ine do deserve each other. Just maybe not in the way young fans may think.
The collaboration was announced by its inclusion in the FW25 lookbook that Supreme debuted on August 25. That aggro Mickey Mouse gripping a mic stand? An overt play on Number (N)ine nostalgia.
Around 2017, Number (N)ine, the label founded in the '90s by genius designer Takahahiro Miyashita, began enjoying a second life as a buzzy "archival" label. Some of its louder graphic pieces became downright valuable, coveted by mostly young and uniformly online fashion dudes.
The mic-stand Mickey graphic is a Number (N)ine classic, a knowing reiteration of a rare Tokyo Disney graphic tee once worn by Eddie Vedder.
In the Number (N)ine canon, it has since earned the appropriate nickname "Mickey Vedder." A killer combo of kitsch, music ephemera, and curatorial cleverness, Mickey Vedder became genuinely iconic in its own way many years ago, so intertwined with the N(N) ethos that it was even reproduced as a collectible vinyl toy. One of many pioneering N(N) endeavors.
But Number (N)ine itself is currently in a state of creative limbo, to put it kindly.
After Miyashita sold the Number (N)ine to a new parent company in 2010, he moved on to TheSoloist. (which he's also departing, following its Fall/Winter 2025 collection). Meanwhile, that parent company has continued to operate Number (N)ine in zombie form, seasonally watering down and reiterating designs pioneered and perfected by Miyashita decades ago. This is the N(N) that collaborated with Supreme and it is by now entirely divorced from the one run by Miyashita.
Supreme, likewise, is quite diminished. It's shifted corporate owners while weathering both lawsuits and withering critiques from the culture it once epitomized, all while rivals have swiped its . When I said that "Supreme is dead" a few years back, I meant that Supreme now has very little place in the scene that it helped birth. And little has changed in the time since.
That's not to say that Supreme and Number (N)ine don't each command some historic respect. (Though, of the two, only Supreme is still dropping noteworthy collaborations.) But they're both relics of bygone eras rather than icons of the here and now.
Certainly a decade from peak relevance, at least, though they're certainly not alone in that regard. Indeed, in that way, perhaps Supreme and Number (N)ine are actually a perfect pair.
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