He's Been Making a Streetwear Magazine for 13 Years, and He Says the Term "Trendy Brand" Is Simply Wrong | 100 People With Ideas

The same old problem of balancing "cool" between the mainstream and the niche. Look at how his magazine, his store and his own brand answer it.

Himm (Wang Bingyi) has a store on Tongren Road in Shanghai called DOE, with one whole wall of baseball caps and sneakers.

Himm keeps remaking the space, so that different brands can hold presales, launches, shows and parties here and have them all look right. Stussy recently took a three-month pop-up spot by the window on the store's second floor. In early October, The Creeper, the shoe Puma made with Rihanna, went on presale at DOE with a launch party. In August, Converse threw a backyard party here too, preselling a reworked, more comfortable version of one of its shoes.

Then there's Levi's. Much of what's in the store was made for it by Levi's: the denim cushions on the ground-floor bleachers, a big map of Shanghai pieced together from denim, the denim apron worn by Dingding, the barista in the coffee area facing the bleachers, and the Levi's logo printed on the clear cups.

The store is also a Nike-authorized "energy" outlet. Nike has run presales here for the Air Force 1 printed with the Chinese characters for "Nike" and for several Air Jordans you could only buy by reservation and raffle. That authorization is hard to get; the better-known holders are Li Chen's streetwear store NPC and Edison Chen's Juice.

Stussy's pop-up area inside the DOE store

Converse's presale event at DOE

Tell someone the store only opened last year and they will wonder how it lined up all these brands so fast. "I've worked with these brands for over a decade," Himm says, offhand. That comes from his other identity: founder of Urban, a Shanghai street-culture magazine. You can spot the clue on the coffee bar, which is covered in trend magazines, most of them from the US and Japan.

Himm remembers that Urban music was at its peak when the magazine started, so he named it Urban. At first Urban was handed out free; it got an official publication license in 2006 and began covering sneaker news, skate culture, streetwear brands and hip-hop, and visiting trend stores.

Urban's forum later became fairly well known. In the blogging years, Li Chen, Zhu Zhu, Zhou Bichang and Sam Lee all kept blogs on Urbanlook, the Urban website. "Once the Weibo era began, we shut it down," Himm says.

But Urban never rode the internet to popularity. Himm recently closed the website, which lets him better "feel the pleasure that print magazines and physical stores bring." At the same time, a magazine about niche culture has grown more niche still — it now turns up almost only in the trend stores Himm thinks are worth it.

Magazines inside DOE / Urban magazine

In the heyday before the internet ruled everything, Himm was probably already an idol to the young people in Shanghai who skated, listened to hip-hop and dressed in streetwear. A few years ago, on Trend Lab (《潮流实验室》), a Sohu Video show he hosted, Li Chen interviewed Himm; the video introduced him as "a leading figure in Shanghai's trend scene."

Yan Dafa, a curator in Shanghai, mentioned while shooting a recent photo feature for DOE that a Shanghai graffiti crew called Smooth Crew, started fifteen years ago, was Himm's.

In 2004, Himm also helped design the Nike Dunk (Low Pro) SB Shanghai, a Shanghai special edition. He is reluctant to say much about that design, but when Nike released it again in 2013, plenty of people showed up in the first-generation Dunk Low Pro SB Shanghai. They are an extremely loyal crowd.

This afternoon, sitting on a long wooden bench on DOE's second floor, Himm turns dismissive about "trendy brands." "That way of putting it is a mistake," he says. "After all, there's no such word as 'trendy brand' in English, is there?"

It really is a hard question. Himm likes Stussy, Supreme and Levi's, no argument there — but when he puts on sneakers, jeans, a baseball cap, a plain T-shirt or a hoodie, Himm says what he is wearing is sportswear, or street style.

Behind that is his reckoning with the trend business. The business started out as more or less the same thing as street culture, and everything it chased had to do with being "cool" — you had to stand out, you had to have a self. Skateboarding, hip-hop, graffiti, street basketball and the rest all belonged to this niche run of "cool."

As early as 1950, David Riesman set out the difference between mass culture and subculture: the mass "passively accepts the styles and values commerce hands it," while a subculture "actively seeks a style of its own."

The same goes for brands. "A niche brand doesn't want to be owned by everyone. A mass brand just wants to make money — it won't change anyone, and there's no loyalty in it," Himm says.

But these brands and groups that go their own way always struggle to hold on to themselves as marketing turns more mass and more commercial.

"Even the ones still alive aren't what they were," Himm says.

PnB, a brand Himm used to love, has vanished.

Nike is the reverse, an excellent commercial example: it recently announced a sales target of $50 billion by 2020. This globally popular sportswear brand used to release very few limited editions, but with an eye on the bigger mass market it has started putting out "low-quantity" lines instead — in numbers far larger than a limited edition.

In China, young people's demand has been amplified without limit, and the trend market clearly intends to make itself the same thing as the teen apparel market, for the sake of bigger profits. YOHO! is a trend magazine that began in Nanjing, but the group now leans more on YOHO Buy, an e-commerce platform it launched a few years ago that sells apparel from more than a hundred brands to 16-to-28-year-olds. It did 1 billion yuan in sales in 2014 and raised a Series D round of nearly $100 million this July, led by Shenzhen's Fortune Venture Capital.

Himm has noticed that the domestic trend market changed in other ways over the past two years too. People born in the 1990s have started their own brands, releasing new pieces on Taobao. "One year everyone's after big black-and-white patterns, the next year they're designing the five-pointed stars that are in.

"They only know how to make products, not brands — they don't know how to find a mark of their own," Himm says. "A New York label stands for that New York street spirit, but in China a lot of places may not have that spirit at all."

In soil not much suited to growing trend brands, when Himm does come across a "young person with ideas," he badly wants to give them a chance. Urban used to shoot each season's pieces for young designers who were cool enough, for free, and Himm has now taken those brands into the DOE store. Their biggest problems so far are still that they can't guarantee delivery dates, and that their prices are low.

Himm's own brand, DOE, is one of these new labels too; the name comes from the English for a nameless person, "John Doe." He picked some very basic cuts and put simple colors and patterns on them, for a plain American street look.

"It's not the kind of trendy brand a celebrity makes. We're all nobodies, and we didn't want to define this style, so we gave it a formless concept instead," Himm says. He drew most of the designs himself and printed the line "Be Formless" on the collar tag. On Urbanlook, well-known faces from the trend scene wear DOE — Himm got them with one phone call each.

In the DOE store, Himm wants to find more young people who share these interests, and to get back to what early street brands abroad were founded for. He put a coffee bar in the store — not the specialty-coffee route, but "very cool," and even more eye-catching than the wall of sneakers. The barista mixed his own blend from beans of five origins, and they also serve Tiger Stripe, an espresso with a pattern in it.

Himm wants the store clean, with nothing superfluous. But too clean, with too few products, is hard to make money on. "How to find the balance in that is a big question," Himm says.

The same old problem of balancing "cool" between the mainstream and the niche. Here's hoping he does better than PnB.

We also asked Himm a few other questions

Q: What wallet are you using lately?

A: Head Porter, from Japan — pretty much all my bags are that brand.

Q: What brand do you have most of in your closet?

A: I cleared out the brands I used to love. Right now it's definitely all my own stuff. It used to be Supreme, but too many people wear it now — it's a brand with real spirit, cheap but made in small quantities.

Q: Do you like fragrance? Which one do you use?

A: I do. The one I've never stopped using is CK — ever since the Summer series started, they've put out a different bottle every year, and I buy pretty much all of them.

Q: Have you thought about a collaboration with another brand?

A: Not for now. As far as we're concerned, our own brand isn't good enough yet.

Q: How do you relax?

A: Listening to music, watching American shows.

Q: What American shows are you watching lately?

A: Too many. The new season of Fargo has started. I like basically all the good ones from before, like Breaking Bad, which a lot of people are watching again now... A lot of American shows are movie-grade. Anything HBO puts out, you have to watch.

Q: Do you like Shanghai?

A: I do, I'm very local! The delivery I just ordered was shengjian, pan-fried buns.

Q: Recommend somewhere good to eat in Shanghai?

A: Dahuchun's shengjian — but don't go to the Yunnan Road one, go to Zhejiang Road or Sichuan Road, that's the authentic Shanghai. When we were kids we called them shengjian mantou. Something like Xiao Yang Sheng Jian isn't shengjian at all — that's deep-fried soup dumplings.

Q: Have you bought anything lately that put you in a good mood?

A: Since opening the store I haven't had the money for big purchases. These past few years I've loved buying cameras and lenses, but I think that's the kind of thing that ruins three generations of a family, so I don't dare play with it anymore, ha. Oh, and I bought some vinyl records recently.

Q: The magazine, the store, your own brand — what do you finally want out of it?

A: To change young people, change how they think, so their heads aren't empty, so they find themselves. Making money won't help you find yourself. American movies look simple on the surface — individual heroism — but think about it a bit more and they're encouraging everyone to be themselves: whatever kind of person you are, that's the person you should become. You're a hero in every field you're in. Chinese people think, oh, Hollywood blockbusters are so vulgar, but they haven't thought about the deeper layer.