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Supreme founder James Jebbia has always thought about his brand in musical terms. “My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music,” Jebbia told Vogue in 2017. “There are always critics that don’t understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion.” Over the past decade, Supreme has collaborated with legends like Neil Young, Bad Brains, and Public Enemy on T-shirts, sweatshirts, and Vans sneakers. The brand’s brought more obscure artists into their universe, too, like Jamaican artist Lee “Scratch” Perry and the late singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston. Now, though, Supreme is partnering with iconic ’90s shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine for their new collection.
The Irish band’s hazy album artwork appears on several new streetwear pieces: the hot pink photograph of a guitar by director Angus Cameron that accompanied their seminal 1991 album Loveless is rendered on a navy blue sweatshirt, and the illustration of two people mid-make out that covers their 1990 EP Glider finds its way onto a gray T-shirt. The images that Supreme’s now translated to T-shirts, sweatshirts, and the like evoke the very same dreamlike quality of My Bloody Valentine’s music itself.
My Bloody Valentine aren’t necessarily the first band that probably springs to mind when thinking about 1990s alternative fashion—maybe Nirvana or Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill now seem more influential in that sense. But if you take a deeper look back at some archival photos the band’s style is actually more eye-catching than you might think. In one old photo from a 1991 Capital Radio Christmas party in London, vocalist and guitarist Bilinda Butcher is pictured in the center in all red denim and a gold sequined top. Butcher finished off the look with a silver-plated, Western-style belt, a subtle statement piece that she later brought on the band’s Loveless tour. A few years later, at a photoshoot in New York, drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig and bassist Debbie Googe showed off equally off-kilter statement belts while Butcher posed in a swirling patterned shirt that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the very first Woodstock.
As Supreme notes in their statement online on the new collection, My Bloody Valentine’s music set the gold standard for the dreamy subgenre to come in its wake. In digging back into the band’s archive, though, it’s clear their slightly eccentric sense of style, unlike their musical influence, has always been vastly underrated. With this new collection, though, Supreme is helping to rectify their lost fashion legacy.
