Streetwear and everything you need to know about the style that transformed fashion

Discover a little more about streetwear…

In the early 1980s, on the streets of Harlem, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, in New York, the history of hip-hop began as an artistic and cultural movement. With the rise of bands like the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Run-D.M.C., the latter responsible for starting the first conversation between music and sportswear, by revitalizing the iconic Adidas Superstar, originally created in 1969, just by wearing them. Five years later, they would release the song "My Adidas", the first single from their third album, Raising Hell, which not only meant a million-dollar deal with the brand, but also managed to reinforce the concept of what they expressed with their songs. : taking to the streets a lifestyle that would function as a solid social expression and an anthem of youth, rebellion and freedom, which manifested itself through two great forces: fashion and music.

Something similar was happening at the same time on the West Coast of the United States. The fury of surfing, skateboarding and that multicultural exchange that arose between the echoes of reggae, punk and hip-hop, awakened in a generation of young people and adolescents the need to have their own style that spoke of the cultural mix that had emerged in the sidewalks of Los Angeles and San Francisco. A dialogue that respected dress codes according to their neighborhood and made fun of fashion aimed at the upper class. In 1984, Shawn Stüssy and Frank Sinatra Jr. partnered to create Stüssy, a firm focused on making clothes for street subcultures, reinterpreting and playing with logos of major fashion houses, using the founder's two initials (SS) as the classic emblem of the French house Chanel (CC). In an interview for The Business of Fashion, Sinatra Jr. recalled an anecdote that occurred in the late 1980s, when Shawn took the Louis Vuitton pattern and christened it "Stu-ey Vuitton," marking the beginning of the symbiotic relationship between the style of the streets and high fashion: streetwear.