Supreme in Japan: Six Doors and a Kinship with the Back Lanes

Supreme is usually told as a New York story, beginning with a first store on Lafayette Street in April 1994. The dates in the Highsnobiety guide to its stores add a second plot. Within four years of that opening the label had three stores in Japan, and on the guide’s list it had none anywhere else in the world. For a label so often described as American, that is a remarkable order of events, and it invites the question of where its founder looked for his audience.

This chapter belongs to Ura-Harajuku: A Reader’s Guide to the Back Lanes and the Labels That Made Them. It records the openings, the collaborations and the friendships the pages give, says where they are silent, and keeps interpretation to the last section. It describes openings, not current trading; check current store details before you travel.

A Retailer before a Label

James Jebbia, whom the Highsnobiety guide calls a British retail entrepreneur, grew up in London and moved to New York City in 1983. The same guide says he opened the boutique Union NYC with Mary Ann Fuscio in 1989 and launched the Stussy NY Chapter store on Prince Street in 1991. A Complex oral history of Stüssy names him among the members of the International Stüssy Tribe for New York, and gives 1990 for the first Stüssy store on Prince Street; the two dates may describe one door, and Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe sets out the difference. What both pages make clear is that Jebbia began as a shopkeeper: a boutique in 1989 and a Stüssy store in 1991 came before a label of his own.

The guide says that he opens a store only where he thinks the place absolutely perfect. The first Supreme shop, on Lafayette Street in New York, opened in April 1994.

Three Openings in One Year

The guide’s list of Japanese openings is the part that matters here, and it is short enough to set out in full.

The guide says three Japanese stores opened throughout 1998, Daikanyama, Osaka and Fukuoka, which makes them the first stores after New York. Los Angeles follows in 2004, and the next opening, in 2006, is again in Tokyo. London opens in September 2011 and Paris in March 2016, with Nagoya and Shibuya in between.

Collaborations across the Pacific

The Tokyo labels in this guide reached Supreme early, and the pages record it unevenly. Yokogao’s profile of Fujiwara lists Goodenough × Supreme in 2000; a Highsnobiety page on Fujiwara names Supreme among his collaborators without a year. Heddels says WTAPS collaborated with Supreme, as with Porter Yoshida and A Bathing Ape, from the late 1990s, without years. Highsnobiety’s profile of Neighborhood dates its first Supreme collaboration to 2007, and, in Neighborhood, WTAPS and the Militarisation of Streetwear, it is one of the label’s two early milestones, alongside a 2004 adidas Originals Superstar.

Hysteric Glamour is the clearest Japanese partner by the record. NSS and Wikipedia both date its first Supreme collaboration to September 2017, for autumn and winter that season. NSS describes a second, released on 18 March 2021; Wikipedia lists a second in November 2024. The counts differ, as Rock, Print and Reverence: Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and WACKO MARIA notes, and the pages do not reconcile them.

Our Reading: A Kinship Made of Friendships

The pages do not argue this, and we do. The closest parallel to Supreme in Tokyo is not a store but a habit. Fujiwara’s circle gathered through acquaintance, as The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene describes, and Stüssy, in the oral history, expanded the same way, with Jebbia among its New York members. Supreme’s Japanese doors of 1998 are, in our reading, the same kind of act as a varsity jacket handed to a friend in another city: a decision to be where the like-minded already were.

It would be misleading to call the relationship a dependence. The guide records only the dates and places; it makes no claim about sales or influence, and we make none either. What the dates do support is a modest, defensible statement: for a New York label, Japan came early, and Harajuku, where the label’s shop opened in 2006, had by then been a centre of Tokyo’s own street labels for years. The wider history of those lanes is in Japanese Streetwear: A Field Guide.

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Questions and answers

When did Supreme open its first store in Japan?

In 1998, according to Highsnobiety’s store guide, when three Japanese stores opened: Daikanyama in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka.

When did Supreme open in Harajuku?

In 2006, according to the same guide; the month is not stated.

Which Japanese labels have collaborated with Supreme?

Pages name Goodenough, WTAPS, Neighborhood and Hysteric Glamour, with dates that differ between accounts.

References

Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.

• Highsnobiety: a guide to Supreme stores
• Complex: Stüssy, an oral history
• Yokogao: Hiroshi Fujiwara
• Heddels: WTAPS
• Highsnobiety: Neighborhood
• NSS: Hysteric Glamour and Supreme
• Wikipedia: Hysteric Glamour

Continue reading

• Ura-Harajuku: A Reader’s Guide to the Back Lanes and the Labels That Made Them
• The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene
• Neighborhood, WTAPS and the Militarisation of Streetwear
• N.HOOLYWOOD and SOPHNET.: Two Houses of Considered Uniform
• Rock, Print and Reverence: Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and WACKO MARIA
• Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe
• Ron Herman: California as Curated from Tokyo
• The Fashionista Bible
• Encyclopedia
• Directory of Japanese Fashion Designers
• Collector Guides

Index terms: supreme · supreme japan · james jebbia · supreme daikanyama · supreme harajuku · union nyc · goodenough × supreme · hysteric glamour × supreme · japanese streetwear stores · ura-harajuku