Interview

GO: Well, I stopped in eventually because I was in the neighborhood. I’m probably the age of your customers’ fathers and I must have walked by Supreme a thousand times before I ever walked in. But I guess I saw something in the window and I thought, “Gee, that looks good. Maybe I’ll go look at that.” Then I immediately realized that both the quality and the concept were great. The khakis or the jeans that I have from you is stuff where I’m like, “Why didn’t I buy three pairs?” A.P.C. is also like that—there’s an independent mentality.

JJ: Definitely. I feel like A.P.C. has done a great job of really sticking to what they do. They keep an eye on what’s going on in fashion, but it’s always rooted in a ’60s kind of French style. Our stuff is pretty similar each season, but we keep an eye on what’s going on, and it’s always fresh, and there’s always, I think, a sense of the early ’90s to it. That era is definitely a big influence running through everything we do—that was a really special time. And since we started back then, I think it’s fine for us to always look to that era and get a lot of influence from it. It’s not nostalgic—it’s more like it’s a part of us.

GO: How did the name come about?

JJ: Supreme wasn’t meant to be a brand. I just was like, “Hey, that’s a cool name for a store.” But it’s become a problem since it’s become a brand because we don’t own the name. It’s a good name, but it’s a difficult one to trademark.

GO: Interview is kind of like that. Somebody has an Interview out in Russia now. But you also have a great logo, so that probably makes it easier in a way.

JJ: Yeah, it does. That kind of thing used to bug me more. I know there are other Supreme shops in other countries, but after a while, people know what the real thing is. With Supreme, there were no grand plans—with the name, with the store, with anything. It all just evolved. These days, it’s a lot more difficult to do that. You’ve got to come out with all guns blazing right away or you don’t stand a chance. Whereas when we first started, there weren’t blogs ready to shoot us down the day we opened. We were given time to make mistakes and grow.

GO: How did you get big in Japan? Was it Japanese kids coming here and then taking stuff back with them?

JJ: Yeah. Do you go to Japan much?

GO: I used to go a lot. I’m dying to go back.

JJ: I go maybe once a year and I always get inspired. I think what happened was, right when we were starting, there was a little scene building up in Japan. There were a few new Japanese brands starting up for young people. Now, they don’t need any more product out there, but if it’s something that’s legitimate, then I think they’re very keen to embrace it. So our eyes were never on Japan. It was more like—

GO: They found you.

JJ: Yeah. We never pandered to the Japanese customer. We still don’t. It’s more like we’re just trying to make stuff for that real pain-in-the-ass, picky New York kid. And I think that the kids in Japan could see that and say, “Okay, yeah, that’s legit. There’s nothing else quite like that going on.”

GO: Japanese connoisseurship is so interesting. There’s this great, educated taste. Last night, I was lying in bed with my wife, watching the football game. She was on her laptop and she said, “The Japanese are ruining the ceramics market!” I said, “What?” She’s really into modern design, and I guess a lot of the modernist stuff she collects has gone through the roof because the Japanese are buying it now. She said, “Our plates have gone up five times in price!”

JJ: What I find in Japan is that there are certain people who have a lot of influence. So if there’s somebody, say, like, Nigo or Hiroshi [Fujiwara] . . . This isn’t dropping names, but if those guys are into, like, [Jean] Prouvé furniture, then it’s going to become popular. They
really do have people there who influence society, and if those people deem that they love something, then it becomes this big thing. These Japanese collectors know what they’re buying, though, from denim to records to stereo equipment . . . They’re very smart.

GO: When did you start doing your own skateboard decks?

JJ: We started doing decks probably around 1997, but more the logo kinds of ones. Maybe once a year we’d do something—no big deal. Then we started doing more around maybe 2000 or something.

GO: Who was the first artist you worked with?

JJ: The first actual artist was Rammellzee.

GO: Was he difficult to work with?

JJ: He was actually one of the easiest people to work with.

GO: Really?

JJ: Yeah. I had him do these pieces in the store. It was very much like, “This is the money I want and I’ll do it.” He was very much like that. Rammellzee is not politically correct. When he comes into the office, he’s a bit crazy and the girls are a bit scared of him . . . [laughs] But I think his decks were the first decks that we did. Then from there we did something with Ryan McGinness and then with Kaws. But I think what really got attention was when we did those Larry Clark decks. What’s important for us is the kid who comes into the store. It’s actually easier to get the art crowd, because they’ll buy anything if they think they can make money off of it. But for us, it’s not good if a kid doesn’t look at it and say, “I don’t know what the fuck that is or who did it, but that’s really cool.” Larry’s decks, I feel, were very much like that. We got both audiences into them. Then Jeff Koons saw the deck that Larry did and liked it, and he did some decks for us, which was really cool. Jeff was as easy to work with as anybody that we’ve worked with—he was just as into it. I really appreciated that he cared that young people liked them and that they looked good. He wasn’t tormented. He didn’t drive us nuts. It wasn’t like some rarefied experience. Since then, that’s really been our approach. Working with these artists is quite a simple process for us: We don’t make a big deal of it, they don’t either, and I think that’s kind of why it works.