What we now know as streetwear -- a ubiquitous clothing style, particularly in the esports space -- can be traced back before the 1990s to the rise of hip-hop and how those styles eventually merged with California surf apparel lines like Stüssy.
Skateboarding (and by extension, streetwear) was on the rise throughout the '90s, hovering just outside of mainstream pop culture for most of the decade as a ballooning subculture. In the process, skateboarding was transitioning from vert style to a street style thanks to skateboarding pioneers like Rodney Mullen.
There's a direct line from Shawn Stussy's signature scribble, which initially came from his surfboard manufacturing before it made its way into his 1984 apparel launch, to James Jebbia's now-inescapable Supreme logo. Jebbia worked with Stussy before his own 1994 launch of Supreme on Lafayette Street in Manhattan.
To show how far we've come since the '90s, we now live in a world where Supreme is launching their own lipstick, courtesy of Pat McGrath Labs.
Streetwear now occupies all corners of fashion style and production, even (or especially, depending on how you think about it) the highest-end fashion houses either by their own design or collaborations with popular streetwear brands like Supreme. Stüssy has collaborated with Dior. Supreme has collaborated with Louis Vuitton. A Bathing Ape has collaborated with Comme des Garçons. Meanwhile, high-end fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Burberry have appeared in hip-hop music videos and been worn by artists and popular athletes. This, too, extends to esports where the New York Excelsior's Bang "JJoNak" Seong-hyeon is known for his extensive Balenciaga collection.
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In the wake of skateboarding's growing popularity in the '90s, ESPN founded the X Games in 1994, with the inaugural competition taking place in Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, during the summer of 1995 with 500,000 people in attendance. Tony Hawk won gold in Skateboard Vert and silver in Skateboard Street at those games, and four years later he had his own video game.
When Tony Hawk's Pro Skater came out in 1999, skateboarding occupied an odd space between being something like the '80s Dungeon and Dragons' moral panic and the most popular rising subculture depending on who you asked and generally (but not always) whether they were older or younger than 35 years old. During the transition from vert to street to mainstream pop culture, the act and sport of skateboarding created an entire subculture that included apparel and lifestyle trends. In fact, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater lead artist, Silvio Porretta, cited in an interview with The Ringer that he drew inspiration from streetwear and sports apparel brands he loved like Stüssy and Adidas.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater embodied this style with appearances from a variety of skating brands (including Hawk's own Birdhouse) on its character models while punching up the street skating style with a wild variety of tricks that stretched the limits of belief. It not only brought the sport of skateboarding into the homes of American teens, but also the lifestyle, in a way that Rockstar's arguably more heavily-branded game Thrasher Presents: Skate and Destroy did not due to Tony Hawk's overwhelming popularity. Suddenly, skateboarding and streetwear were everywhere pushing into the mainstream in a more commercial way.
As a suburban American teenage girl at this exact time, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was the epitome of cool. Despite not being able to skateboard myself -- although I later built the entirety of my schedule during one year in college around being able to snowboard as much as possible -- I fully bought into the culture. Young women at the turn of the millennium typically went hip huggers and a kerchief top. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater showed me another way to dress that seemed much cooler. My reasoning was certainly that I felt like an awkward outcast in my daily life and dressing this way somehow made me cool, which was an integral reason behind the commercial success of the Pro Skater oeuvre.
A common thread in interviews with Stussy the man and not the brand is not only a lack of pretension but a genuine disbelief at the wild popularity of his first brand. It happened completely by accident and without the express purpose of creating apparel. Stussy effectively disappeared from not only his own brand but the industry entirely for 13 years before returning quietly with his own S/Double brand.
Tony Hawk now has his own high fashion clothing line, released in collaboration with photographer/director Anton Corbijn. Two decades after its initial release, gamers still look back fondly on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 will be remastered and released on Sept. 4.