Original subtitles

Empire Skate tells the story of a group of kids who ushered in a new era of

skate culture in New York City in the 90s. A lot of these kids came from

rough neighborhoods, broken homes, tough situations, yet they found family in

each other. And their meet -up spot, their clubhouse, was their local skate

called Supreme.

Skate shops were hard to come by. They'd pop up and then they'd close, which is

the nature of any small...

skate shop that's struggling to get by.

And it's not until 1994 when Supreme opens that these kids finally have a

that is going to stick around and is going to do it in a way that's so

and so fresh and so incredibly New York.

The energy and the attitude and everything that was happening at Supreme

undeniable that it couldn't be stopped.

The inspiration for this film came from my experience skateboarding, falling in

love with the sport, the culture, the camaraderie. My local skate shop is

me and my friends hung out and shared ideas and learned about the culture.

And because of those reasons, this story really hit home for me.

were to go around one of these streets you frame things whether you know it or

not like a psychiatrist might call it a kind of selective attention or

unattention this is going on that's going on but you are looking this way

a sense you're not even seeing something you just have a general view there are

many many beautiful things happening there are many ugly things happening

Do you really have an idea of the thousands of things going on?

You have to understand New York in the 90s because it was all of it. The music,

the culture, the attitude, the game boarders, the clubs over

capacity, 200 people outside.

You had rappers battling each other.

Everybody was fresh and full of ideas.

Hip -hop just blew up. Nas, Biggie, Wu -Tang.

It was the culture and the lifestyle, and we were a part of that.

We were just like the fly guys on skateboards.

New York City was our playground.

What we were doing, what we were saying, we had hard in the 90s.

We changed skateboarding. We changed the slang of it.

There were no skate parks. There were no vert ramps. New York was like raw,

gritty, real street skating.

Power, pop, the aggression.

People used to call them from like Cali and shit, and they couldn't even hang

out with us. They used to be like, these motherfuckers are crazy.

There were just this chaos of the streets, taking it in places at speeds

downstairs that I would never consider.

And that brought a freshness.

And there needed to be a fresh skate shop in New York, because it wasn't

that. You can't think of skateboarding in New York City without thinking about

Supreme.

That's just how it is.

It'd be a skate shop, yeah.

But we'd have the finest and the flyest shit.

It's going to be a really high concept. The skateboards are going to be the art.

That was our clubhouse.

It was like our home base.

You know, nobody really knew what Supreme was.

People would be like, what's Supreme?

What's Supreme? And we'd be like, oh, the skate shop on Lafayette.

It was bold.

It was big.

And it was ambiguous.

The way it switched.

The clientele changed and the rest of the world caught on.

These are clothes that are about culture, often counterculture.

We had guys spend $10 ,000 on clothes and they gave us 30%. That's when I

started to realize, like, there's big money in this shit.

Bye.

Bye. Bye.

We didn't just say, hey, there's something special happening here.

We were creating.

Day by day, night by night.

There was no Supreme without us.

The only way to truly understand Supreme is

to understand the kids who lived it.

The ones who called it home.

If you won the raffle last night, just stay against this wall and we'll start

letting you in.

Make sure you're on that list. Don't waste my fucking time.

We hustle for this. So we've been camping out. We have people camping out

Tuesday.

A lot of limited items in there. Stuff is running out fast.

When I walked in, I said, give me everything you guys got. It's a pucker

It's really crazy. They gave a certain amount of people raffle tickets.

So those are people that get to go inside the store first, they get to shop

first, they can buy everything, and the rest of the 150 people waiting around

the block can get nothing.

Supreme's just a phenomenon.

Fucking world famous.

You hear rumblings and you hear rumors about, you know, daily totals and amount

of product and every Thursday drops and what's up.

It's incredible.

There's a lot of value in the brand. You buy the shirt, you can resell it.

This is all hype.

Everything is hype.

Hype, hype, hype.

The hype is kind of like, I just think most people don't know what they're

buying into.

Do rappers even know what the origin of Supreme is?

Do athletes?

You know what I'm saying? I think it's important for people to know the origin

of that.

To kind of like know like everything that was or is supreme is a byproduct of

kids from New York City adopting skateboarding as a culture.

Which we were anomalies to begin with.

Growing up in New York in the 80s, touching a skateboard was like unheard

We were weirdos back then.

My brother and sister were like so against me too with it. They're just

oh, you're trying to be this white boy. Like, I don't understand.

But the minute I touched the board, it was set in stone.

I'm going to get the green.

This is my life.

Who is Mike Hernandez to Mike Hernandez?

That's interesting.

to self -judge. The story actually, relative to skateboarding, starts in

school. And all I thought was eat, sleep, skate.

Constantly looking at a gap, a railing, a ledge. You know what I'm saying? A

city skater or a street skater.

And then subsequently, Jeff Pang became my rabbit of inspiration.

Very talented skateboarder.

Man, we've heard so much about you, you don't even know.

Like, all very good.

Okay. That's comforting.

I got a dollar for that shit. What? You got a dollar, son. You're gonna make it

this time.

Jefferson Pang.

I call him my ninja.

100 % skateboarder, but one of the toughest people I know. Like, do not

Pang.

Peter Vesey, he was a fucking swag master extraordinaire.

very vibrant, very outgoing.

I grew up in the Bronx when I was younger. I grew up in the South Bronx

was younger.

Once you live in the Bronx, you have this thing.

It's a special thing.

It's like you're from the Bronx.

And when I was a kid, my guidance counselor was like, what do you want to

life? And I was like, I want to become a professional skateboarder.

She laughed right in my face.

I looked at her and I said one word. I said, watch.

Have a good day. Have a good day. Have a good day. Have a good

day.

Every fucking trick there was.

Shut up and do it.

That's when I met Stephen Cowles.

Stephen was super good. He could skate anything, vert, pool, street.

When I first started skateboarding, it's because of my older brother.

Let me tell you a quick story. There was a kid skateboarding down the block, and

my older brother was with me.

I stopped the little kid, and I asked him, hey, can I see you skateboard?

So I rode on it.

It was a feeling I cannot describe.

This is my love. This is what I love doing.

So when it was time for me to give the kid back his skateboard, my brother was

like, oh, no, you can just go home, kid. You can just go home.

And the kid was like, I have my skateboard.

He goes, ah, it's my brother's now.

Thank you to that kid.

I feel bad.

When I found a skateboard and I got the bug, it was it.

Nothing mattered all the way up to high school.

Nothing.

Parents were like, where are you going to college? And I was like, I'm not.

He's mad, but like tough.

Street skating was evolving at that time.

Now in New York, it was, you know, a bunch of crazy kids, like mostly from

dysfunctional families that came from all these different boroughs. And

eventually we all just became one unit and we skated together.

The skateboard was my, like, vessel to go anywhere I wanted.

You know, being 13 years old and not having anyone but your friends take you

around skateboarding really, like, opened up my eyes.

We were skating these uncharted territories.

We'd go in the direction of wherever skateboarding took us.

It was like having the ultimate freedom. If anything, we were like swarm of bees

in Midtown or financial districts getting whatever we wanted to.

Stairs, a ledge, a flat ground trick.

Man, we would go from uptown all the way to downtown to skateboarding miles.

It was just like raw skating back then. The skateboarding scene was underground.

We didn't have a lot of shit out here, like skate shops.

Like, I mean, there would be one or two at a time.

We had the whole skate, but that started going downhill.

And then there was ODs that was opened up by, like, kids, like, our age.

Then there was also Benji's, which was fucking insane.

Benji's skate shop was a bedroom in his apartment.

He would go up, it was on, like, the 18th floor, and he would have whatever

could get his hands on.

He'd have some wheels around. He'd have some trucks.

And this little kid going to this guy's house.

This is so wrong on so many levels.

I think anybody who ever went to Benji's apartment was like, still to this day,

like, that was fucking weird.

Oh, that dude was hilarious.

Oh, there's a...

That's our ceiling of the shop.

We had all these broken boards all over the shop and everything.

Let's see.

A skate shop was like a workshop.

And Skate NYC, that was so, like, them.

You know, we're going to put these fucking cracked boards, like, on the

It's a relic of skateboard lore and tradition and just where we met up.

It's almost like if you build it, they will come. It's not like we have this

kind of vision, like, oh, we're going to do this thing, everybody's going to

hang out. It's just like, we're going to do this thing because we love it.

When I worked at Skate NYC, they were passionate about creating a space for

kids that skated.

You know, some of the first people that I ever saw do art shows for the kids.

So way ahead of the curve.

You know, these are things that are regular occurrences now at skate shops.

You felt welcome. You felt belonged. You felt like you were somebody.

It was, in my opinion, it was the first Supreme in that it was a clubhouse, a

safe haven, somewhere to come and be you with other people that are you.

We'd be there every day, every day.

We were the iconic place to hang out if you were a high school dropout.

I'm not proud of this, but, like, these kids were not gone.

Okay, but they were learning about skateboarding and some of them had hard

lives, man.

I grew up in like a real dysfunctional household.

I wasn't going to high school, so I would just go straight to the city.

The meeting place was Skate NYC.

My friend Harold Hunt at the time, he was the one that introduced me to them.

I remember everything about Harold. He would just frequently come by the shop

from day one. And with Harold, because he had such a giant personality, came a

lot of other people, right? Because he was the most likable person you'd ever

meet. Harold was a character. He had flair. He was the East Village diplomat.

Harold Hunter made you feel... If you met him for an hour, he made you feel

your best friend.

Harold Hunter. That was my introduction to the Lower East Side and

skateboarding. And it was the first time I saw a real passion, passion about

skateboarding. And I was just so impressed with him, just how he stood it

did it and dealt with it.

I came from a broken, broken, broken -up home, you know?

Man, he would crash at my place. So, like, when you're like that, you know,

you're always living by your wits. So, like, skateboarding is salvation.

Skating -wise, I feel like there was just little glimpses of New York in the

80s.

Little... Little snippets. There was a few Thrasher articles.

Jeremy Henderson had the cover doing a wall ride.

There was a few little articles that you'd see.

But you got to remember, like, New York was not even close on the map on the

skateboarding, like, in the skateboarding market at all. Like,

the king.

California, that's the playbook for the tricks, the culture.

Board sales, wheel sales, anything skateboard related, they were number one

globally. This is who the pros were.

You had Tony Hawk, who was this super progressive kid.

You had Rodney Mullen, who was the freestyle innovator.

There was just like a mix of amazing skaters. It was mesmerizing.

The heyday of the 80s skating, we were rock stars, literally traveling the

on someone else's dime, doing what we loved doing, performing everywhere.

For us, California felt a million miles away.

There was this big gap.

They had skate parks, they had ramps, they had all, every way you possibly

Perfect weather, the skate scene, the photographers, the companies, they

have that in New York.

It was, hey, hit this, do what you can. Skating in the middle of the streets was

just chaos.

Nothing was optimized.

New York fucking city ate a big fucking apple under a coat of fucking ice.

20 degrees, gloves from the hardware store, duct tape.

We're trying to make happen what they already have.

New York is a completely different type of animal, not to mention the vibe.

I mean, the vibe on the streets of New York was, I think, quicker and more

dangerous.

You're going to have to get dirty, and it's rough.

My motivation and who I was inspired to emulate or hate was the Shutt crew.

Those were early instrumental, kind of like shaking my brain, like, oh, that's

ill. Like, those are street skateboarders.

Shutt Skateboards was a homegrown skateboard company dedicated to street

involving the stars of New York and the surrounding areas.

What we showed the world was that you don't have to be from California to make

it. They were the badass dudes, you know what I mean? They just were different.

The brand was different.

I was like, holy shit, that's not lying on the U -ramp or the vert ramp and shit

like that. Like, that was something that I was like, I can relate to that.

This New York -style graffiti I hadn't seen on a skateboard before.

It's city -inspired.

So the graphic had to do with the life that we were living. So we had a street

posse, and the street posse was like, you know, we're wearing hooded

sweatshirts, but we're not really committing crimes. We just want to

Took that whole California beach life thing and it just automatically became

harder because we were doing it out of New York City. So everything was so raw

out of New York and so gritty and dirty and grimy, you know.

It wasn't neon and hair down, you know, it was more like you're living in the

streets, like you better learn to survive.

We're talking about probably like 86, up to like 89.

And at that point in time, New York City was a fucking shithole.

Yet another violent incident struck our subways during tonight's rush hour.

Homelessness, drugs, crime. People are afraid to look out at night.

Crack epidemic was hitting hard.

People fucking robbing people, shooting people.

I was in foster care, taken from my parents because they were addicts.

I had to learn to survive.

That neighborhood I grew up in was either you either made it or you became

product of the environment.

You know, like most of the people I grew up with, they're in prison or dead

right now.

You know, we call them at -risk kids.

Kids who are kind of AWOL.

Their parents and their teachers don't really know where they are.

And they're in a pretty rough spot.

What was great about our crew, our skateboard crew, is that we looked out

each other. We always looked out. I had a skateboard and a whole community that

would support me out on the street that was always going to have my back.

So, again, it's really dark and scary, but, like, there's all this really

interesting stuff happening at the same time.

And all these amazing subcultures intertwined.

I hung on Lower East Side, and over there, Lower East Side in the late 80s

totally different. It's not like his now.

It was like that was the ultimate.

Raw New York City melting pot of everything from like skateboarding to

to punk rock to artists. Everything was there.

The East Village art scene is going off.

You got fashion. You got music.

And we were putting all those influences into our skate shop.

There was this real embedded culture.

And all these kids were like finding out like how to dress, where to go, what is

cool.

dreaming and plotting a future for themselves.

You know someone back in the day that had a skate shop that was doing

it for the love of skateboarding?

There wasn't enough skateboarders to support the business to actually survive

a skate shop.

There was no way. We weren't making any money.

whatsoever.

But we were contributing so much more than that, which we were well aware of.

But, you know, landlords still need to get paid and shit, right?

So I shut it down.

Skate and YC went out of business.

Soho Skates went out of business.

Benji's was a wrap. O .D.'s was a wrap.

We had no, zero skate shops.

Nothing. Right when I started skateboarding, if you look back in like

80s, that's when it died.

And it went completely underground.

You know?

Skateboarding does that.

Skateboarding died every other decade.

And that's been our history.

It happened quickly.

We lost our team, and we're no longer manufacturing shut skateboards out of

York City.

I would say the lowest point of skate popularity was around 91.

Skating was no longer in fashion, but the industry was largely centered on the

West Coast, so it was never going to die in California. It was always going to

survive here.

In New York, it was so impossibly hard to keep it going.

I never considered quitting skateboarding.

New York did it for life.

That's all I wanted to do. I wanted to go pro.

I wanted to live the lifestyle.

This is my dream.

Fall, get up. Fall, get up. Fall, get up. And get up.

This is part of the glory of what skate's built on. So much of it is

in... a kind of abject failure.

Skateboarders are just like, we're not cockroaches, man. There's no way you're

going to get rid of us that easily.

And then what happened, I think, what was so important and I think shapes the

world today of skateboarding more than almost anything else is what was going

on the East Coast, especially coming out of New York City.

Skateboarding culturally was in a transition.

Bird skating was pretty much on its way out, and it being a Cali deal, and

street style skateboarding was transitioning in.

In the early 90s, skating was so small, and street skating was where everybody

kind of came together, steering the ship toward the future of skateboarding.

It's going to flow, you know what I'm saying?

It's going to go with the flow.

And in all fairness, What is skateboarding? Because skateboarding

of its heart, it's riding down the street.

So in New York, it went underground, but at the same time, they're actually

reseating and revitalizing skateboarding.

We all were kind of progressing at the same time, and I was really picking that

shit up real fast, all the technical free skating stuff.

Cats were honing their craft and like we started to simulate what trick

selection was and like what the fucking swag was and shit like that.

So what came out of that rebirth sort of, you know, I see it as a rebirth.

And if there was ever a kickoff to a culture or time in New York City with

skateboarding, it was in 1993.

93, it's like bubbles start to occur.

Started meeting this new generation that's starting to come up, guys who I

started to meet through skating.

Shocking how good they were.

We were like the up -and -comers. Us being that crew that was going to set up

the new New York, you saw this one thread evolving in the scene where

like, oh, this is New York style.

You know, you knew it by seeing it.

This was some New York shit.

So this is 93, skateboarding started to grow, and my mind is going crazy because

I'm thinking somebody's going to come in and eat our lunch.

And Rodney Smith came to me one day, and he was like, I'm going to do another

skateboard company. It's going to be called Zoo York, and that's it. The dam

breaking.

We're cracking this shit open, and it's going to be New York first.

I just was like, I live in New York, and it's a zoo.

Okay, Rodney, Eli.

It's a go.

Fernandez.

So Eli and I got started. We went and pooled our money together, got this

warehouse in the dirty -ass meat market, and it was great. It was glorious.

It's not going to be a skate shop, though. We're going to sell clothing and

skateboards to the rest of the world. So as I am good at drawing graphics,

Rodney is good at finding skateboard talent.

Most of the importance of having a skateboarding company falls on the

that you have representing your company.

And my whole concept was to bring individuals that represented the skate

that was going on at the time.

You know, we brought on Ryan Hickey. No one's ever heard of this guy before, but

he's freaking phenomenal on the skateboard.

New York kind of crept up on us. They were introducing a lot of guys that you

hadn't heard of.

But it was clear that there was a rise in the East Coast. There's something

exciting happening there. And it all started coming together like that.

The Zoo York crew was like these misfits of the time. Maybe at times

intimidating because we were out of our minds.

You got the whole package. This wasn't just like some kid dating. This was like

some kid skating with his friends, telling a story, doing his trick.

New York City was the backdrop.

And the skate industry. Never seen anything like that. Like a crew of

from New York being New Yorkers.

All

that

stuff started to come out.

Oh, my God.

On our side, I think we were so used to what we'd been doing, we were all

turning to, hey, what are these guys doing?

All these dudes had a unique style, a unique look, a totally different

aesthetic.

And then pulling it together at this iconic place called the Brooklyn Banks,

where all of a sudden it was like, oh, this is what hardcore street skating can

be.

Brooklyn Banks are a public

plaza on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was everything a

spot needed to be the best skate spot.

Put the boys in the better line. You're always talking about the boys in the

better line. Put Ali over the wall with cars, running down the ramp. It was

crazy.

Put the boys in the better line.

You're always talking about the boys in the better line.

The boys in the better line.

I was a young one.

That zoo crew, those were the top pros during that time. So I was under their

wing.

Taught me the bad, the good, the ugly.

We had a lot of issues with security guards.

I was a big antagonist. Fucking tried to get inside security guards' heads while

they were skateboarding so they could get their shot.

We were just like right there in this little like moment of change.

There's more skaters now.

It's growing day by day.

New York is having magnitude and being recognized, and other pro skaters are

coming to New York City to, like, hang out and skate.

Thank you so much.

There was always so much East Coast talk, like, this is California, but...

There's a whole thing, a land of streets and buildings and bricks and cold

weather. And when you went to spots in New York, 9 times out of 10, no one had

even done a trick here yet.

Is there a skate renaissance going on in New York?

But there's no skate shop.

There's no skate shop.

My name is Frank Crittenden, junior from the Bronx.

My nickname is Chappy.

Grew up, raised, 163rd Stebbins Avenue.

At the time, growing up, in my hood with a skateboard, it was like, what the

fuck, Cap? What the fuck does this do? Like, you want to be a white boy? What

the fuck? And that's how it was, you know? But I skated every day and moved

to the village.

Started working at Union, one of the hottest boutiques at that time.

Marianne and James Jebbia, they owned this shop.

James Jebbia comes from England, and he arrives to New York in the early 1980s.

The Union store, when it opened, was selling sort of very, very, very early

streetwear stuff.

It was one of the first streetwear boutiques.

People from all over the world came to visit Union.

We had the fly shit, honestly. Union had the fly shit at the time.

This was quality goods from, you know, designers that were sort of, I guess,

potent.

I was courting the store to sell my stuff, and James refused it. He was

well, you're selling to, you know, those guys up the block, so I'm not going to

be in that same radius. I was like, well, I'll stop selling to them. I'm

selling your stuff.

So James Jebbia, after the success of the Union store, expands and they open

a Stuckey store.

Stussy was one of the first streetwear skate cultural brands.

John Stussy, it's his artwork, it's his design.

It's like surf skatey, but it's like Rasta.

It was a real lifestyle brand.

The messaging was amazing, the graphics, just like the statements.

It was always so tongue -in -cheek.

They did some things that were very unorthodox.

and almost seemed opposed to growing, to becoming more mass, to becoming

more appealing to a larger group of people.

Like it could right now be in a lot more stores, but then, you know, you guys

wouldn't be here wanting to talk about it and all my homeboys wouldn't want to

wear it because everybody else did.

A lot of people collect them, you know, like if, say like, you know, like these,

you know, there's 10 colors and people buy every single color.

So with Stussy, even Union, James Jebbia is bringing this energy of streetwear

and the sensibility to New York and creates this foundation that can sort of

build up.

The time, you know, I'm at Union and I'm skating and James is like, oh, what do

you think about opening a skateboard shop?

And I'm like, well, yeah.

But he's like, let's make it a boutique skate shop.

It'd be a skate shop, yeah. But we have the finest and the flyest shit.

So, looking for locations.

We're trying to figure out names.

And this one name just kept popping up.

Supreme.

Supreme.

Supreme.

It's a very...

Strong and powerful.

The name of the business as Supreme, you know, let's do the best possible, most

uncompromising version of this thing.

It was bold, it was big, and it was ambiguous.

A name that somebody could relate themselves to, you know what I mean, and

of like big themselves up for Supreme.

The location, downtown Lafayette Street.

When we went to Lafayette, I was like, I like the space.

People could skate. Pretty much an empty street.

It was a hair salon.

It's a furniture store.

It's a pop shop.

People were like, what? Skateboard shop? Where? What? Lafayette? What? Who?

What?

Who would even open a skate shop in New York? Every skate shop in New York's

failed. But Supreme.

was definitely not your normal skate shop.

Like, for me, I still, to this day, I think about how, like, my first

introduction to Supreme was.

I remember, like, going from Queens, skating downtown.

I'd never been there before, Lafayette.

So I'm, like, looking around. I can't see. I don't see anything.

I'm skating the wrong way. I ask the lady. She's like, no, it's the other

I see this, like, store.

It looks kind of, like, nice and clean.

Brown paper over the windows.

And it says Supreme on it.

I walked in, and I was just like, whoa.

This is like a state -of -the -art, modern skateboard shop.

Sick.

The concept was neat, clean, very manicured.

Is this a gallery?

Are the skateboards the pieces of art?

Because in your mind at this time, when you think of a skate shop, you think of

graffiti tags and skateboard bolts screwed to the wall, a catastrophe.

And then they went and opened Supreme.

It looked like an empty space, but it really wasn't because it was so neat in

there. You know, nobody's ever thrown something like that before.

I feel like I was the first person when they unlocked the door, I was there and

holy crap, like, this is mind -blowing.

It was a legitimate skate shop.

It was kind of like skating while she was junior high.

But here's high school.

I went there to get wheels and hang out and do skate shop shit.

Supreme was selling Zoo York, so you didn't have to come to the warehouse if

didn't want to. And everyone was skating Zoo York boards.

There was pride that like, oh, we have a skateboard company. It's doing good.

Now we got the skate shop.

Supreme became that main hub.

You know what I'm saying? That's where we came to chill, organize, decide where

we're going to go fucking skate.

Yeah,

kid.

We would meet there and go skate throughout the day.

We'd always wind up back there, you know, use the bathroom, clean up.

Everyone would be there.

If you can't find anybody, nobody has cell phones there. You would go to

Supreme.

We used to always play, like, really loud music.

Super loud, like the windows were clean.

Plus, like, you know, you had a bathroom.

Like, you had a little changing room in the back, you know. You had free

clothes. You're like, this place is great.

We would go there and hang out all day, skate in the front, and get taken care

of.

You knew every skater. You know, every skater. You met either at that shop or

maybe another spot, but for the most part, everybody came through there. You

knew everybody.

Supreme was family.

Everyone they hired and anyone that was a part of it was a part of us.

Yeah, Chappie had asked me from the beginning to work there.

Well, my friends are part of this, then I'm going to be with it too.

When I worked at Supreme with Al and these guys, it was cool. Everyone had

other's back.

We could trust each other.

And at that time, Lafayette was fucking dead.

There was nothing happening.

Nothing.

We're talking about Supreme 1994.

There was no reputation.

We were making no money then, man, you know.

So it gave us a lot of time to entertain ourselves with storefront and the

streets that come along with it.

James was a perfectionist. Like, this could be neater and tighter, and just

try to turn this way to display a bit. It looks better.

Everything was neatly tucked, like the T -shirts.

Don't you unfold those T -shirts.

I could still fold a shirt in my sleep just because how many fucking shirts I

folded. That's really your only job. The rest of it is all like, come on, you

have the best job in the world.

Yeah, it's retail.

But it's not.

These guys would come to work drunk.

I'd be like, go upstairs and sleep.

I don't think I was bloodshot. I think I had blood coming out of my eyes.

We'll take breaks. Like, who's going to sleep first?

I'm crying blood.

And I'm speaking in Psalms. And he's like, oh, my God, what's wrong with you?

I'm like, you were there last night. What's wrong? What do you mean?

I can't stand the rain.

He's like, just go to sleep. Just go to sleep. Go in the back and go to bed.

I don't know if James knew what was really happening at the store.

Beer bottles and people screaming and yelling and cursing.

And they're running a business on the other side of the door.

What is incredible about Supreme,

even from the earliest days, is how menacingly New York it was.

You went into the store.

You might not be able to find anyone who could help you.

We were frustrated that you were even here.

If you've never skated, if you don't have a scab on your knee from falling,

please don't come in here.

This is for insiders and it's for people who get it.

Because it was like, this is our store. You know, this is our shop.

It wasn't like you could be, you know, someone in from Long Island or

Connecticut, Westchester, Jersey. You're like, oh, this is nice. What do you do

here? Those kids would be really abusive to you.

They were not polite.

This is our rules.

Like the store back then was our rules. We don't like it. Fuck you. We don't

care. We don't need your money here.

Shutting people down just for being annoying.

You know, like, no, you can't buy anything.

No, leave, buy.

Someone would probably get sued now if you fucking try to do that. Oh, you

tell me.

Don't take the fucking shirt off the shelf.

I was an asshole.

I was an asshole.

James, he knew there was an attitude in the shop and he liked it.

We wanted this, like, fucking dysfunctional, crazy kids from the

That whole attitude we all had is kind of what made Supreme what it was.

What's up, James?

You know, James is a very private person.

I knew the employees, I knew them.

But who was the mysterious person that was enamored with skateboarding culture

at that point in time in New York City?

I mean, I think that's, like, the million -dollar question.

Is James Jebbia right?

He probably doesn't like any of us talking about him.

It's funny with James because you don't want to say anything to piss him off.

That's the thing I'm holding back.

Are you crazy, man?

He's just like, literally, he is like the Wizard of Oz, right?

James Jebbia is a very mysterious figure. And of course, that approach,

especially in fashion, is always going to make you more tantalizing.

He likes his thing to be his thing on his time.

The evil genius.

Now, James is fucking a great dude. Super humble, smart.

And even before Union, he worked at this very cool downtown boutique called

Parachute. So he obviously had some kind of elitist retail experience.

One of the more creative minds who are understanding that there's something

happening. Sort of seeing that there was a community out there ready to put

their blood, tears, whatever you want to call it, on the streets. But can you

now give them, like, merch that follows their attitude?

To create a skate shop was an early exercise in branding.

So you created a set of T -shirts, things that went on boards.

James had that vision. You know, he saw, basically, from his deals with Stussy,

he saw what he needed around him, what he needed to use.

He knew who needed to wear these T -shirts.

He knew the garments and the garment. I mean, I never seen James ride a

skateboard. He never skateboarded with us. He wanted us to wear his shit.

He's like, these kids are cool.

I want to make clothing for these cool kids, and I want them to wear it.

I know that for a fact.

James was very smart to fill out the culture around skating.

Sensing who the kids were, who were the ones to put up, the ones to represent.

When we were all skating at Astro, and I was told this about me, that James

Jebby used to sit in the diner across the street and watch me skate.

He liked the way I dressed and all this shit, and that's kind of like where they

went with trying to bring the brand.

People's

attitudes,

people are already attracted to, you know what I mean?

But James does his research as well, and he would see these skaters and go, oh,

yeah, so what about this guy, and what about that guy?

A lot of us in New York, we already had that in us, war things that other people

wouldn't wear when they were skating, you know?

Don't get it twisted, like, we didn't grow up like skaters, not me.

We used to dress in, like, baggy clothes like kids from the hood.

So James Jebbia is looking at how these skateboarders are wearing their clothes

and finding that really compelling. You can see that so clearly in the kinds of

young men who are on the Supreme skateboarding team.

The

original

Supreme team, like the inaugural team, was Ryan Hickey, Justin Pierce,

Mike Hernandez.

Giovanni Estevez, Jones, Keefe, and myself.

That's the original squad right there.

That was my routine, Clay.

Back.

And they're a group of soulful kids who aren't going to win X Games. You know,

they're not going to medal at this stupid event.

But they got style, personality.

They did an ad with us, shot in the basement of Supreme.

We're like, you know, two little lambs, and we're drinking.

And it was like an homage to, at the time, the Calvin Klein ads. There were

these black and white ads. It was very similar to that.

There is an authenticity to it, and it doesn't feel like anything's being,

pofered. It's more like...

How can we actually bring the streets into the mainstream?

And at the same time, they're trying to get their message across.

The final nail in the coffin, the key, the thing that made this all work was

into this world sort of stumbled Harmony Corrine and Larry Clark.

Harmony got a film script bought from him.

So now he's telling all his friends that he's been writing about observing for

the past year or two. So now kids, this movie, and Hollywood and other things

are coming into play.

You know, it's called Shop Up, and they're like, yo, we're making a movie,

Justin Pierce. We're making a movie in Harold. Yeah, we're making a movie

Kids.

Justin, I knew from the beginning he wanted to be an actor. I knew that. He

in the drama club in fucking high school.

What you want to do now?

We didn't really know the whole storyline of the movie, but they made

in the park and they brought all of us in it.

It was like a regular day at Washington Square Park where a lot of friends were

hanging out, but they were filming us.

Casper, our friend Justin Pierce, you know, one of the original Supreme guys,

was skateboarding and bumped into someone by accident, and then the guy

really mad, and everyone taxed the guy.

Showing it how it was, really, you know, there was no acting, no real makeup.

They were all being themselves, pretty much.

Kids was based on the things that we used to do when we were younger, and as

young kid, you know, you're just living wild, you're living just reckless.

I was supposed to play myself.

But when I was going to pick up the script, I ended up stopping first and

into a store that sells gear, and I ended up doing something stupid, and I

up getting locked up, and I couldn't put it that way.

Sad to say, I was already smoking weed before that movie.

So it was no pressure, nothing when we did that. It was just us being us.

I didn't think nothing of it. After we did this movie, I just thought, cool,

I'll go back to skiing and doing that.

The Movie Kids has become a bona fide hit, the critically acclaimed new film.

Critics love it, so do audiences.

Ever since this film played earlier this year at the Sundance and Cannes Film

Festivals, it's been one of the hottest topics of conversation in the film

industry. Kids was a culture shock movie of the time. It was showing real life.

I mean, they had real people that really lived this way.

Sex, drinking, drugs.

It's a deeply shocking and disturbing film, which feels absolutely authentic.

The new film, Kids, poses shocking circumstances for today's youth. It's

disturbing. Is it bad for kids?

Is it bad for kids to see?

No, because it's the truth and it's what a lot of kids are doing.

I saw Kids in the theater when I was in college.

We thought it was shocking and gnarly.

This was like a loss of innocence in skateboarding. Like, whew, man, it's

getting raw out there.

Kids,

that was the changing of the guard, the moment for everybody.

A lot of people would compare Justin to Matt Dillon.

Justin had that talent and ability.

Harold loved the attention. Harold loved it. Any chance he got to talk about it,

any chance, any girl that came up, you seen kids? You seen kids?

Kids just took us to a global platform.

It really did. It put skateboarding on the map. It put our crew on the map.

After that, people started recognizing Supreme.

If there was an audition or casting, everybody, those castings would go to

Supreme. They know where to get the cool skaters.

You know, we was getting lit.

People were starting to pick up.

They started to see Supreme stickers.

James Giver stickers.

Packs of Supreme box level stickers.

Everywhere I went.

People were looking and seeing him.

You see that red sticker with a white, you're like, oh shit, what is that?

You see it here, oh shit, I've seen that before.

It became a set of iconography.

This kind of urban hieroglyphics.

At first people would be like, what's Supreme?

And we'd be like, oh, a skate shop, a Lafayette.

And then it was kids pointing at it, oh, Supreme, Supreme.

Supreme was gaining a lot of popularity.

People wanted to be associated with it, so they had to be associated with us.

You were like a celebrity if you were a part of the Supreme crew back then.

It could allow me to go to a club. It could allow me to walk up in an area

I normally wouldn't be able to go to because I have these guys around me.

Wait, you're letting skateboarders in in front of dudes that have thousands of

dollars to spend on bottles for models?

And we're getting into every party.

If you didn't give free drinks to 20 of us at a club where half of us aren't

even old enough to get into, then you can't come in the store and you can't be

cool.

Unfortunately, that's the truth.

It was noticeable. If you were in New York in the mid -90s, you knew, like,

those are the Supreme guys.

All wearing the same sweatshirt with the box logo.

Box logo. With the box logo.

That's Supreme font.

It's not original.

It came from somewhere else.

What I think is really interesting about the box logo is that it is itself an

appropriation inspired by the artist Barbara Kruger.

Same typeface and that style with the red sort of backing behind it and saying

something provocative and strong.

She's got the kind of rhetorical fierceness that really fits Supreme,

this language of coercion.

I shop, therefore I am. A comment on our materialistic society.

If I don't have the cool new sneakers, if I can't afford those things, am I

cool?

I don't think that another shitty logo would have the same effect as it did.

People have a real connection to that box logo. Those were pretty instantly

collectible.

Our clientele back then was 80 % Japanese.

And they just loved the street culture. They loved Supreme. They loved

everything that we were doing.

I think there was a perfect storm of Supreme being

in the right place at the right time with a Japanese culture, wanting to

on something real.

I remember going to Japan and some gentleman, right after I got done

skateboarding, literally bought the shirt right off my back.

$1 ,000 for Supreme box. He was like, here you go.

Thank you.

Supreme had a thing. It was limited on what you could buy. Like a box of old t

-shirt, you could buy one.

I don't care how much money. It's just what it was.

And there's only this many of this and the limited of that.

So there were certain ways that business was done at Supreme that needed a

certain kind of salesperson, a certain

kind of tact, if you will, to deal with customers that were coming in.

These are buyers?

Some of them are buyers, yeah.

They were called buyers.

They wanted to buy Supreme Coals in bulk, bring them back to Japan and

them.

So we would be straight up.

Oh, you want this?

Yeah, it costs $28, but you want another one?

This is how it's going to work.

You got to pay cash on top of the retail.

At the time, the going rate was 30%. We had guys that would come in and spend

$10 ,000 on clothes, and they'd give us 30%. That's when I started to realize,

like, this is big money and this is shit.

You take care of us, and we take care of you.

Go get us three bottles of champagne, a bottle of alcohol, go shopping.

I mean, we just give them kind of like ridiculous laundry lists of things for

them to go and get.

I'd have the guy come in the morning, leave me his credit card. He'd give me

order. I'd pull it. And all through the day, I'd bring up three t -shirts with

two t -shirts with a couple pairs of sneakers.

The boss couldn't tell. He would see the shit getting sold, but not in bulk.

And that was it.

So we just made sure that everyone was taken care of at the end of the day.

Like, no one left sad. Let's put it that way. We all walked out very happy.

We're making fucking thousands of dollars a week each, and we're not

These are the first resellers, absolutely.

These are the people that are making money off brands that's growing,

and becoming an iconic brand in the making.

And this was the price.

It's the price for everything.

Oh, yeah, the back room is very infamous.

It's VIP only, you know?

Man, it was like T .G. Chong lived back there.

Basically, it was the Vatican. Like, if you didn't have access, you couldn't

come back. And there was a very small amount of people that literally couldn't

go behind the counter and go into the fucking back.

We treated like Studio 54, like, yeah, no, no, you, no.

So after, you know, a long day of skating, we'll go by Supreme.

It's already closed. You knock, you see if anyone's in there, and roll the dice

for a little bit.

I won $550 back there. I love that.

It was basically like a pre -party before the party.

A lot of it was basically snapping on each other, making fun of each other.

You know,

a lot of tough love.

You definitely have to deal with getting roughed up.

They were quick to tell me, Dill, your shirt's way too tight. What are you

doing? What are you doing with those pants? Those shoes are crazy.

It was a safe haven for us.

We had love there.

We had love at Supreme, love that we didn't even have in our own homes that a

lot of us, you know.

Unfortunately, a lot of the stories I hear from my fellow skateboarders

up, you know, they came from, like, broken homes, right? They had massive

in their homes.

And I was one of those kids.

You know, my mother passed away when I was six years old. My father was not

around.

I'm the first generation American.

My Albanian grandparents raised us.

Imagine being like 10 years old and your mother being like, Daddy's coming home,

go upstairs.

You never knew who you were walking into when you came home. When you open that

fucking door, it could be, you know, cool, or it could be like you're walking

into like a straight brawl.

You know, not boo -hoo me, but, like, my folks broke up when I was super young,

and I never saw my parents because they were always out doing their own thing.

They were like, oh, the kids got it. They got keys. They're fine.

Holy shit, that's fucking scary.

And thankfully, I found skateboarding, and skateboarding introduced me to

everybody else.

We fucking had the same exact story.

Mike Hernandez's parents died when he was a kid. He was being raised by his

grandmother in Section 8 housing in the Bronx.

Justin didn't ever have to go home.

We could stay out for three nights and no cops coming for you.

Like, they'd just be like, oh, cool, they're not bothering me at home.

Harold didn't have a mom or dad.

He had a grandmother who died when he was 16 years old.

We knew that about Harold, and, you know, everybody knew I didn't have a

but it's not like we all spoke about it. We just knew that...

His skating comes from a place that's real, and my skating comes from a place

that's real.

It was just a release.

You can go skate the whole city all day and just forget about everything.

This moving, like I'm moving, I'm moving fast.

I was in control of my skateboard, where everything around me, like I had no

control. And it just made me happy.

Skateboarding was the second family.

Not saying my mother and my siblings didn't give me love, but it was just a

different kind of love that you had with the skaters that grew up with each

other.

This made me love them, and they love me.

And so, you know, it's beautiful.

But a lot of us from that type of upbringing have a lot of emotional

that we kind of don't, we hold it in, but it's still fucking there.

And I think with Justin, it got to a point where it was like that baggage got

too heavy.

I can't

speak for every individual from our clique and what they were going through.

I can only speak for me being a byproduct of what I witnessed growing up

skateboarding and who my parents were.

You know what I mean?

But I know that there was issues at home with his real father. He didn't know

who his real father was. And his stepfather, he didn't fuck with him.

You know what I'm saying?

The person you saw in the film, kids, that was Justin. It's that Justin had a

lot more emotion and...

He was a super deep person, dark, very dark.

Justin's a whole nother story.

You know, he was making it. He was doing good. He had everything going in the

right direction.

He moved to L .A., got the part next Friday.

We fucking were just like over the moon about that for him.

People in Hollywood or whatever, films, saw a lot in Justin.

Justin's a passionate dude. He wanted to try to make it.

Then it's just like...

You get a phone call.

And it just, nothing up

to that point in my life, it was just like, you know what I mean? Like, this

first time you ever have, like, a loss, especially a loss, like, as close as

that, it's like, it's just tough. You know, it's tough for everyone.

As much as I love Justin, I'm mad at Justin for, you know, taking himself

out because he could have been here right now.

When that

kid died,

I've never felt that much pain in my life because, like, I had such a

close bond with him.

Supreme closed that day, and it was a day of mourning.

Justin was the first of our really good friends to pass.

You know, and there were too many others after that.

And they were all devastating.

Harold was devastating for more than his friends.

Harold was devastating for the world.

Because Harold was bigger than himself.

I mean, how could you deny that personality?

When I heard Harold had a heart attack, I broke down like a baby.

And my feelings haven't been that hurt since my mother died.

So it kind of, you know, it brings me back to that.

That hurt.

You know,

to me, skateboarders are like, they're like superheroes to me.

So when someone dies that's a skateboarder, more so even a

ran with, that's like a shock.

Put me in a place of humility, you know?

Yeah.

Thinking about skateboarding, it's like, you know, what do we do?

We eat concrete all day, every day, and that's what we do.

We seem unbreakable.

That mentality of being unbreakable carries along with life and death. It's

like, there's no way this person's going to die.

And then shit happens.

I had, like,

screaming in the building. I lived in a tenement building in Lower East Side.

I went up to the roof. We had access to the roof.

I looked at the World Trade Center, and I see this huge gaping hole in it, and

it was just fire and smoke.

And then we all know what happens.

You know, everyone says New Yorkers are tough, but that was just, that came out

of nowhere. So that was really, it blind, literally blindsided everyone.

But the skateboard community checked in with everyone. Like, we would call the

shop up and see how everyone was doing.

Was anyone affected?

We found out that everyone was fine, and unfortunately all these people, you

know, passed away, firefighters, police.

That was a crazy dose of reality, you know.

Nothing's promised, and like that, we could be gone, you know.

The day after, the streets were completely abandoned. There was nobody

except for emergency vehicles and then us.

Us trying to make sense of what had just happened.

We're all cooped up. No one knew what to do. We needed to release some stress,

block everything out, and just go skate.

It was just a beacon.

You know, you use those buildings to figure out where you're at in a city.

I was devastated. It was where I cut my teeth. It was my childhood skate park.

It really was. It's where I learned to skate.

I could, like, close my eyes and literally draw a map of the footprint of

World Trade Center.

We used to go there every day.

And I was very fortunate to get the shot, and, yeah, it's one of my

I didn't go down there for a while.

So much loss.

So much change.

Obviously, there's a horrible trauma with a lot of denial within New York.

But one of the things New York does well with is trauma to some degree.

It's good when it's humble.

There was a big shift between the night before 9 -11 and then what life was like

in New York after that.

After 9 -11, all the people that were part of the downtown scene sort of

tighter knit. I think everybody started living in a creative way like it was

going to be their last.

Anything that you thought about, you experimented with, you wanted to now do

This U kind of doesn't have a separation.

The photo at Supreme, you've probably seen it on the back side of the flyer.

me, it was definitely a time of inspiration by what was happening around

who I was able to be in the same circles with.

Supreme was part of that because it was a hub.

Cool kids were hanging out. Skaters were in front of the store. Loads of people

started coming by, and it gained momentum.

There's this real affection for New York that happens. And Supreme, in a way,

became this, I mean, I don't want to say hometown hero, but almost in a way, you

know, that survivor attitude, that relationship that skateboarders have to

city. That attitude almost seems to reflect the attitude that everyone here

at that time.

You know it was going to get popular and big because it was getting popular and

big. Even way back when, slow and steady.

Oh, we got a decal.

Decal. But it grew into this huge, you know, mushroom cloud

explosion.

The explosion of Supreme came with the Supreme Nike collaboration.

That's where it actually went worldwide.

We did the Supreme dunk with the elephant print.

That was the shoot.

When the cement dunks came out, I remember that day pretty clear.

A lot of people online.

And we made so much money over those next several years, man. It was fucking

nuts because Supreme was blowing up.

We went from like taking breaks, sleep, do whatever we wanted, to now we

couldn't even leave the store.

So you're seeing this happen, this global phenomenon is happening on so

different levels, and we see the beginnings of the sneakerhead, and then

spread to other areas of the fashion industry.

One of the things that happened with streetwear was a lot of money rushed in.

Ukraine started to be able to do collabs with different brands.

You know, what these collaborations do is they sort of bring two communities

together, which I think doubles up on like the kind of energy that you can

create. I can't think of anyone who's done it more prolifically and more

successfully.

The cross -marketing, it was brilliant.

But that was just half of it.

The other half is the way that they roll it out.

You make it super exclusive.

How much is this? A thousand?

Yo, get the biggest in a black sweater, get the white shirt and get the deck.

The limited way in which Supreme dropped its product is something that was

really pioneered by Supreme.

No one else is doing these weekly drops and like the quantities are very small.

But then that's also what started the whole retail business because there's

like so many of these pieces in the world.

And if you want something, then you got to go and spend three times as much on

it.

I walked in today, I spent like $7 ,000. Some of the stuff is collector's items,

so I'm going to keep that. A lot of stuff is for high -end clients that I

I'll probably double or triple that.

I've gotten book bags and sell the book bag for like $400, like for nothing. And

I get a few of them, you know what I mean? So $800 in one day, $1 ,000.

Cool, thank you. We got a couple of bags, a couple of boards, a couple of

logos.

It's a profitable week.

Once people figured out that they could go and buy something for a certain price

and make any amount of money on it after that. The clientele changed and became

such a giant retail thing.

That drove people crazy.

For a couple hundred dollars? For a couple hundred dollars, bro?

We were doing, like, a sneaker drop, like, on a Monday, and these fucking

would show up in lawn chairs Friday night, be camping outside. It used to be

funny, because I used to drive by the shop sometimes at, like, one or two in

morning, coming back, and I used to fucking stop, be like, what the fuck,

I'd start making fun of them. So they hated me.

They were fighting their own battle that we had nothing to do with.

Like, we show up in the morning, we open the store, whoever the fuck was first.

They might have been last night.

And I don't know how they got there.

And for me, when it got like that, that's when I was kind of over it.

It was losing its thing, I thought. It's like, it's underground, it's kind of,

it's becoming mainstream.

To the point where like, all right, I'm making good money, but now I'm not happy

over here.

And that's why I stopped working at Supreme.

I left Supreme in 2004.

I couldn't do it no more.

This whole retail mafia game.

It wasn't the same dynamic.

People just moving in different directions.

But I was inspired by where I've been, and I wanted to try to make my own mark

and emulate sort of it, but emulate what I've learned, but do it in my own way.

Over time, I was able to build something that was mine.

And that was DQM.

I phased out of my skateboarding career at that point.

And I was considering what I want to do with the rest of my life professionally.

You know what I mean?

Chose to become a firefighter.

And I took the test with Mike Hernandez.

I became a New York City firefighter in 2004.

And I worked in the Lower East Side in Ladder 18.

I was skating in that neighborhood, and now I'm a firefighter in that

neighborhood. It was just this weird, like, full -circle thing that just kind

happened on its own.

There's a beauty in the simple trajectory of being a pro skateboarder.

And now you've humbled yourself to a way where you're like, now I serve my city.

I ran through my city.

Now I serve my city.

Everyone thinks that skateboarding is this fountain of youth, but bills catch

to you, and all of a sudden, you're going to have to actually become an

Thankfully, the brand's popularity has created an opportunity for a lot of

people from the skate culture and from the era to actually thrive, and me

working for Supreme happened organically.

Could there ever be another Supreme? I highly doubt it.

It's amazing what it became.

The menswear designer of the year is Supreme.

I will sum it up like this.

There's no other brand that I know of like Supreme that would come from a

store on Lafayette Street to grow this big.

And they built this huge, in the end, multi -billion dollar industry.

And they have a lot of power now.

But it had to rise from something.

And to me, that came from a level of self -expression. The kids were

this whole evolution of style.

And they were skateboarding and they were hanging out.

That was the glue.

It's just this beautiful thing that's kind of organic that happened.

And it goes back to just the love we had for skateboarding. And we show that

love to whatever we touched.

I love skateboarding.

I love the attitude. I love the energy.

I love everything about it. I love seeing the youth coming up.

It means a lot to me.

So I still carry the torch.

We've left valuable marks on our city culturally.

Good thing we had each other. Good thing we had skateboarding.

I met friends that are still my friends.

Skateboarding gave me a family.

Definitely gave me a family, nine and a half.

It's all about family and being close.

We were different, man, you know, out here. The cultural, the friendships, the

people that we would become, the streets made us.

It's very surreal being a firefighter for the last 19 years, seeing the

the gentrification, skate parks being everywhere.

It's cool to watch the city embrace it and support it.

I just marvel at how many kids are skateboarding.

Seeing skate parks and all this stuff in New York City makes me feel good for

the younger.

But I'm from the raw, the hardcore -ness of it, you know, the streets.

Oh, my God.

Ain't no other like us. Ain't no other people going to do this like we did it.

That's what you call a hard day skating.

Fuck that.

Empire Empire Empire

Empire Empire

Empire Empire Empire Empire

Ah, yeah, Empire City.

Ah, yeah, Empire City. On the move, on the move, to the toe, it's so gritty.

Empire City.

Empire City.

Empire.

Empire.

Empire.

Empire City.

Empire City on the move, from the moon to the tower, it's so gritty. Fuck

yeah, the two -way's crackin', no Whitney.

Yeah, what we want can't stop, it's no ditty.

Ah, yeah, Empire City.

Hey, ah, Empire City.