A Tale of Two Streets: Supreme vs Madhappy

The idea of being “in” is an economy in itself: streetwear drops, exclusive social clubs, and now, as we’ve seen, viral consumer social products, which we’ll be focusing on for this piece.

3LAU turns to both the streetwear and fine-art industries for inspiration, because both of those worlds invert the mainstream music-industry model of low-margin ubiquity in favor of high-margin scarcity.

Before streetwear was prevalent on eBay, before it was stocked at your local mall, and before brands started to open their own direct e-commerce stores, your best shot at owning a Supreme garment was to fly to New York or Tokyo and visit its brick-and-mortar stores.

In the absence of religion and other community belonging, consumers yearn to find the brands they can use as signals for identity curation and kinship – signaling to other Glossier or Stanley cup girls that no actually, we’re the same. Brands do this signaling implicitly (owning Aesop hand soap reveals something about you - well-to-do, metropolitan... See more