Denim Tears is launching its new flagship "African Diaspora Goods" store in New York.
The brand’s founder Tremaine Emory announced the news on Friday, sharing that the store, located at 176 Spring St. in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, will open on March 15.
African Diaspora Goods will act as a cultural hub, centering Denim Tears' narrative storytelling on the Black diaspora.
Emory also shared three colorways of the announcement flyer in the colors of the Black Liberation flag.
The store design was a collaboration between Emory and Theaster Gates, an award-winning multidisciplinary American artist and urban planner.
The location of the new Denim Tears brick-and-mortar is sentimental for Emory, who often visited 176 Spring St. when it previously housed Union and then Stüssy. "These influential labels have a long-standing relationship with Emory and informed his own work as a leading designer and aesthete," a press release reads. "Denim Tears’ succession into this space can thus be perceived as a symbolic passing of the torch." The store will also partner with Emory's new media company, which is slated to launch later this year.
Emory started Denim Tears in 2019 and since then has collaborated with Ugg, Stüssy, Champion, Converse, ASICS, and Dior. He made headlines last summer when he abruptly left his role as creative director of Supreme, citing systemic racism as the reason for his departure.
“This caused me a great amount of distress as well as the belief that systematic racism was at play within the structure of Supreme," Emory reportedly said in his resignation letter.
The 42-year-old's exit coincided with the cancellation of a planned collaboration with Arthur Jafa. Emory later described on Touré’s podcast that Supreme’s founder James Jebbia was initially enthusiastic about potentially working with Jafa. However, Emory later told The Washington Post that Jebbia "removed images of a lynching and a formerly enslaved person" from the collaboration without speaking with Jafa first.
