By 10:00AM the line has nearly reached the corner of Lafayette and Prince. These Thursday drops typically bring out the hypebeasts in need of a good herding. A quartet of security guards, apparently short-staffed today, tactically arrange these young men and women two-by-two with a disciplinary combination of courtesy and caution. One bald-headed official in a Nike Pro Combat compression shirt explains, "This store complains" as he institutes strategic gaps so as not to block other businesses' doorways. There's too great a risk of revolt to handle matters any other way.
Casually dressed, the physically imposing guards give polite yet stern instructions and mingle with the regulars, those Supreme patrons who come here so often they've transformed this stretch of downtown Manhattan into quite the literal scene. And it's a scene alright, one that Larry Clark would surely slurp up even if this wasn't the debut of the filmmaker’s new collaborative line with the enduring streetwear behemoth. Though ostensibly this crowd has assembled to purchase goods inspired by the imminent twentieth anniversary of his seminal and provocative movie Kids, the director could walk by right now and nobody would recognize him, or, if they did, give a fuck.
Two decades later, Clark's reputation seems more of a past-tense provocateur, his recent films like Wassup Rockers and this year's Marfa Girl making little cultural impact if any at all. Conversely, Kids' infamous, well, kid writer, Harmony Korine, released the perversely popular Spring Breakers in 2013, taking the apathy of Kids and amping it up to cartoonishly violent ends, helping it become a sort of phenomenon in the process. No doubt that the young people in front of or behind me in line have seen at least one, if not both, thanks to the convenience of streaming video sites and torrents. Still, most were wearing BabyGap in 1995, if they were even alive at all.
If you have even so much as an inkling of what a Supreme line might look like, you're right. For hours, these streetwear-loving teens and early twenty-somethings of varying races and sizes queue in anticipation of their shot at the latest gear. Some are alone, others in sizeable groupings of friends. They're united by a common brand devotion, a collector's single-minded determination that defies the myth of undisciplined youth. They'll wait because the shit looks cool, signifies cool and is just cool. Passersbys ask questions, perplexed by the answers. The security guys huddle and disagree about "priorities." A line cutter is dealt with. The sky threatens rain.
There's something absurdly, quintessentially American about this organized mob of purposeful loiterers, all these active young capitalists already wearing Supreme eagerly waiting for the privilege of buying even more Supreme. Bearing that unmistakable white-on-red Futura Bold Italic logo like the Mark of the Beast, theirs is as much a uniform as the bog standard (read: basic) suit and tie ensembles my generational subset—one lost in the academic and sociocultural quarrel over where X ended and Y began—was meant to abhor.
"Do any of you want to talk to Complex about the collaboration?" asks a microphone wielding woman. She is met, at first, with silence, a medley of teenage male shyness and general awkwardness. As she leads her crew to the first willing interviewee, the guy paired directly next to me mutters, "Fuck Complex," courageously out of earshot. Not long after the grey clouds produce more than a few droplets, he departs in a defeatist huff and doesn't return. Apparently, he had somewhere better to be, something that gives me a private chuckle considering the aimlessness of most of the characters in Kids.
***
Back in 1994, I was in need of some direction. I'd taken up hanging out in Greenwich Village, no small subway ride from my parents' Queens apartment. Browsing the T-shirt and head shops of 8th Street eventually led me further and further east, onto St. Marks and into parts of pre-gentrification lower Manhattan I'd explicitly been told to stay away from. Washington Square Park was permitted. Tompkins Square Park was prohibited. Along this stretch, it seemed like everybody wanted to sell me drugs—"Good sess, good smoke" was one particularly mobile dealer's jingle—but my minimum wage part-time job at the community center barely funded my already crippling pre-Napster music addiction.
Ultimately, what lured me into Alphabet City that summer other than idle curiosity was, of course, a girl. She'd only just graduated from our high school and was attending NYU that coming fall, while I was a scrawny goateed little jerk who'd barely made it out of freshman year without my dick falling off from bored self-abuse. She was a stunning Latina who smoked Newports and dressed in all-black leather and gothy corsets that suited her voluptuous frame. And for some strange reason she was interested in me.
We "dated" for a month and then she broke it off, only to get me back a few weeks later when she discovered I'd made out with a classmate she didn't like during a screening of Forrest Gump. Somewhere in all that she presented me with an amazing mixtape of '80s synthpop ballads and branded my neck with a sick hickey arguably worthy of a trip to the E.R. My parents, naturally, did not approve. Naturally, I didn't stop seeing her, surreptitiously meeting up in Queens for hopefully air-conditioned subway rides into the city. With her, I mingled with squatter punks, skaters and homeless runaways as far east as Avenue C, learning as much as I could from these people who were so much cooler than me. One day she bragged how she'd been scouted, that she was going to be an extra in some movie called Kids. She dumped me for good not long after that.
Some time the following year, I read about this apparently controversial movie in either New York Magazine, which my mother subscribed to, or the Village Voice, which I typically grabbed on my downtown trips. The media coverage talked up Kids' depictions of perilously unprotected sex and illegal drug use, all of which at least appeared real. (According to Supreme's promotional interview with Clark, one scene where several shirtless boys smoked pot led much of the crew to nearly quit.) Though some of the leads were over 18 and playing young, the film's supporting cast apparently consisted largely of kids my age and shot on some of the very same streets I prowled.
Mostly, I was repelled. As a demographic representative of the subculture Kids presented, I resented the notion that anyone could define who we were, who I was, in 91 minutes. The MPAA's original NC-17 rating, though, effectively surrendered by the film's distributor, felt like the sort of appropriative zeitgeist capture marketing gimmick I'd been conditioned to oppose. Fledgling screenwriter Harmony Korine was already of legal drinking age when production began on his rude tale of naughty teens acting out in a world conveniently devoid of parental supervision or scruples. Lou Barlow, who soundtracked the film with original songs from his band The Folk Implosion, was pushing thirty. As an aspiring pervert, I quietly admired that Clark, a man in his fifties, could make such arty filth and be appreciated for it. But still, who the fuck was this old fart to try and tell my story?
Despite my defensiveness and angst, I eventually gave in about a year later and watched it on LaserDisc at a college library. Though the interconnected narratives of teens Casper, Jennie, and Telly give the film its structure, Kids seems intended as a statement, a reactionary nose-thumbing to all the PSAs, school assemblies and D.A.R.E.-style prevention programs of the '80s and '90s. If Clark and Korine were to be taken at face value, what my generation ultimately gleaned from all of this earnest outreach and indoctrination was that drugs were cool and sex was amazing.
It turns out we hadn't been scared straight by the rise of HIV/AIDS. Instead, our elders had created a generation of budding nihilists and hedonists, fully cognizant of consequences but somehow liberated from any fear of them. Played by Leo Fitzpatrick, who was less than a year older than me, Telly rationalizes he can protect himself from the perils of rubberless pleasure by fucking virgins, manipulating tweens into giving themselves to him with banal, disingenuous sweet talk. Of course, it turns out he's already exposed. The girls his age, represented by Chloe Sevigny's Jennie and her friends, aren't naive conquests, but bragging sexual conquistadors in their own right. Everyone's at risk, but nobody's acting like it.
I wanted to believe that Kids was another lie told by adults, that hyperbole and shock tactics made for good cinema, but didn't reflect my reality. The film plays at a world without morals, but ultimately carries a moralizing message—SEX WITHOUT A CONDOM? NOT EVEN ONCE!—as heavy-handed as anything grown-ups had crafted for us. It came off like yet another attempt to spook us into doing what authority figures wanted. But all that denial was hypocritical of me, as I'd willfully committed to the same it can’t happen to me mantra as I spent the rest of my high school years pursuing and having sex, both protected and unprotected. That I survived strangely suggests I was right all along.
***
After about three hours in line, I spot a nearby group of men old enough to remember Kids. They stand in the street, all wearing blue or grey blazers, open collar white oxfords, slim fit khakis and expensive-looking brown shoes. They play with their smartphones. Their bodies are fit. One eats a breakfast sandwich, an indulgence he can work off on the treadmill later. All have great heads of hair or handle their baldness expertly.
They pile into a sleek Suburban, on their way to some business meeting or the sort of lunch where black cards are brandished like fine samurai swords. People like Clark and Korine stopped mattering to these guys a long time ago, if they ever did at all. This is my generation, but here I am, standing around with a bunch of kids willing to spend hundreds on graphic sweatshirts and skate decks. At my age, being aimless ain't so cute.
Finally, I'm in. If you've never been, the Supreme New York store is a tiny box with product on opposite walls and a chasm of customer space between. The collaboration looks fairly unimaginative, selected artful stills screenprinted onto $40 T-shirts and $138 hoodies. The signed decks are marginally better, insofar as their size displays these images in a more aesthetically pleasing way. It's all pretty standard shit.
Another line forms, this time at the cashier. Within minutes, an employee barks at me from across room, as they tend to have a reputation of doing, for thumbing through the merchandise, as if I'm somehow doing it wrong. I grumble back at him in submission to whatever unknown rule I've seemingly violated. The handful of shoppers allowed inside have grabbed things that aren't even part of the collection. The big screen TV in the window isn't even showing Kids. There aren't any movie-related photos on the wall. The soundtrack sucks.
This is exactly the sort of schtick my generation stood against, a slick marketing machine selling shit by pretending to like you or be like you. We wouldn't have spent three hours in line waiting for free drugs and pussy, let alone the privilege of buying overpriced clothes that have been picked over. And, anyway, none of this shit is in my size. Nothing matters here but the merchandise. So I walk out empty handed. Larry Clark doesn't want to take my fucking picture anymore.
Gary Suarez is a writer born, raised and still living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter here.
