Nike's Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 sneaker.Supplied
When the Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 shoe went on sale in May, the flood of would-be buyers crashed Nike’s servers, sending irate sneakerheads into a frenzy on Twitter. The sneakers sold out in a matter of hours nonetheless, a sign of both Nike’s dominance in the streetwear hierarchy and Scott’s trajectory as a rapper-turned-fashion icon with a serious following.
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Fans who managed to purchase the shoes were rewarded with bragging rights on social media, and the opportunity to resell them for upward of $2,000, a tidy profit from the $160 retail price. While this might have been a sad day for anyone fruitlessly searching for a pair of Travis Scott Jordans, it was a win for everyone else involved and a textbook case of how savvy brands design for a new kind of customer: the hypebeast.
Travis Scott's growing fame and the Jordan 1's limited supply created a hit.Supplied
A hypebeast is someone who’s obsessed with owning the newest and latest releases from streetwear brands such as Supreme and Nike, the more exclusive the better. With these customers and their outsized social-media influence in mind, fashion brands are now locked in a race to create ever more hyped, scarce and covetable sneakers, hoodies, T-shirts and accessories.
For Nike and Scott, the successful website-crashing design was a 1985 Jordan high-top reworked in brown, black and white leather with a backwards swoosh and Scott’s “Cactus Jack” logo embossed on the heels. It’s not a particularly eye-catching shoe, but that’s ultimately unimportant. Any new version of the iconic Jordan 1 is sure to attract attention, and coupled with Scott’s growing fame and the shoe’s excruciatingly limited supply, it was enough to create a hit.
“That’s really the game that all these brands are playing, trying to understand that dynamic and trying to drive demand,” explains Josh Luber, founder of StockX.com, a streetwear-resale platform recently valued at $1-billion. The major brands, he says, are constantly in search of the next new Kanye West or Virgil Abloh, a multihyphenate figurehead who can draw huge sales while retaining their cool factor. Based on the sales of his Nikes, Scott could become that kind of figure.
StockX.com founder Josh Luber.Rankin/Supplied
Just as celebrity collaborators and constricted supply play an important role in driving demand, social-media platforms influence the design of products themselves. “Most kids are seeing stuff on a phone, which is not even two-inches square. That’s what their shopping experience is,” says Jeff Staple, a New York-based streetwear designer whose own Nike sneaker collaboration once caused a small riot outside his Manhattan retail store.
The dominance of Instagram as a shopping tool, he says, profoundly changes a designer’s job. “We design clothes based on how things will look on social media. It’s a shame, because now if you create an incredible shirt or an incredible pair of shoes that has a ton of subtle detail, it won’t sell as well as something that’s loud, because the delivery method is Instagram.
In the same way that social-media algorithms gradually steer viewers toward ever-more-extreme content to keep their attention, the medium is pushing fashion toward designs that put the brand name front and centre. “It no longer pays to be Ralph Lauren Purple Label,” says Staple, referring to the luxury brand known for its high-quality, understated, logo-free designs. “For any brand like Nike or Polo, eight out of 10 people want the swoosh or the polo horse as large as possible on their shirt. Regardless of what the designer might think, that’s what’s going to sell the most.”
New York-based streetwear designer Jeff Staple's own Nike sneaker collaboration once caused a small riot outside his Manhattan store.Harrison Boyce/Supplied
With all of the marketing that goes into courting hypebeasts, it’s easy to conclude that the design of a product itself is somewhat incidental, but this isn’t the case. “Great design is a given,” says Aaron Levant, founder of streetwear e-commerce site NTWRK. Hypebeasts, he says, support brands first and foremost because they are synonymous with good taste.
A new pair of Yeezys or a jacket from Abloh’s Off-White label, for example, carries the same kind of status for a streetwear fan as a Rolex or a Porsche does for someone in a different demographic. The more powerful a brand becomes, however, the more hype their products will generate, regardless of how they look. “Certain brands have so much power that anything they do, no matter how preposterous, is considered great,” Levant says. “Supreme could wrap a fishhook in tinfoil and call it earrings and people would buy it.”
He’s only half-joking. Supreme’s summer 2019 drop included a set of fishing lures now selling for upward of $30 each on StockX. One could, in theory, use them to troll for bass, but they’re clearly designed to attract a different beast.
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