Long Lines at Shawn Yue's Sanlitun Streetwear Store: Is the Celebrity Streetwear Business Getting Better?

Starting a streetwear brand looks like an easy move for a celebrity. But beyond the “fan economy” and “hunger marketing,” it takes something more.

Shen Jiaqi, 22, opened a Taobao store last year selling streetwear labels like Carhartt WIP, WTAPS and Neighborhood, sourcing the clothes himself in China or through friends who buy for him overseas. At 8 p.m. on October 24 he went to the second floor of S6, in the south zone of Sanlitun Taikoo Li in Beijing, to wait for a store that would open at 10 the next morning.

Eighteen hours early was not early enough. He missed the first 80 places in line, and after the doors opened he waited another four hours before he could get inside and buy nearly 20,000 yuan worth of merchandise. Because each person could buy only one of each item, he came back the next day with three friends to “sweep through again.”

The store Shen visited is called Madness (MDNS for short), the first brick-and-mortar shop opened since Shawn Yue launched the brand of the same name in 2014. Until now the only official ways to buy it were the official website and YOHO. On opening day, the brand's Weibo account posted a message that read “Heartfelt thanks to all the friends who came to support us,” which drew 70,000 likes.

As Shen tells it, “Taobao is now full of MDNS fakes.” The official site carries limited stock, updates on no fixed schedule, and almost never restocks old styles — which smells like hunger marketing — while YOHO's goods are “different from the official site's; MDNS licensed it to have other factories make them.” So a physical store opening in Beijing was, to him, “pretty rare.”

The new store isn't large, about 100 square meters, right next to Croquis, a JNBY label. Yue designed it himself: the main colors are black and natural wood, and the two sides facing the walkway are wrapped in clear glass. A white tent and succulents sit in the display window, simple but a little mysterious.

The store mainly sells the 2016 AW collection from MDNS and its women's line MADGIRL, both in a retro military style, plus a T-shirt made only for the MDNS Beijing opening and two limited collaboration series: figures and T-shirts with the American contemporary artist Ron English, and distressed T-shirts and hoodies with the Japanese brand NUMBER (N)INE. The cheapest item, an umbrella, is 199 yuan; the most expensive, a leather jacket, is 15,000. T-shirts and shirts average 600 to 700 yuan.

When we walked in on the afternoon of the second day, most of the opening-limited pieces and the collaboration series had already sold out.

Inside the store; images from @sneaker concept

Celebrity streetwear brands are nothing new: Beyoncé's Ivy Park, launched this April, Kanye West's Yeezy, Drake's OVO. But compared with the early, one-note sense of “merch” and “cashing in,” the job the clothes do has widened. If you treat a celebrity's public image as an IP, a streetwear brand has become the most common and most important part of that IP, and the way it speaks.

“MDNS is just how Shawn Yue dresses every day, his taste and what he likes. Look at his selfies on Instagram, the photos of his office — they look pretty much like this store,” a fan in a Madness x Carhartt WIP hoodie told QDaily while waiting in line. At the store entrance and on the big LED billboard in Sanlitun, the 2016 MDNS fall/winter promo video — Yue against grassland and pasture fencing — ran on a loop.

Plenty of celebrity streetwear brands are still stuck inside a small circle of fans, but collaborations with other well-known labels are slowly widening the audience.

Yue launched his first personal brand, Common Sense (CMSS), in 2010, though in his own words it was only a line of “special editions and collaborations” — nothing but pieces made with other brands, no store, no website of its own, so it had to ride on its partners' sales channels. Those partners included New Balance, Nike, and the Japanese labels Neighborhood and BAPE.

MDNS, founded in July 2014, was his first personal brand in the full sense: alongside collaborations, it puts out regular spring/summer and fall/winter collections.

Shen isn't a Shawn Yue fan. He started following streetwear as a college sophomore, on Baidu's ACU Tieba forum. At first, like most of the posts there, he wore only “flashy” BAPE; the more he bought, the deeper he got into Japanese labels like Neighborhood, and into the business — and it was through the collaborations that he began paying attention to MDNS. As he sees it, “this brand leans Japanese, so the circle is smaller than for the American and European labels, but guys from southern China love it, because it isn't loud and colorful like the Western brands. The designs are simpler and easier to wear, and the sizing suits Asian bodies better.”

The line held plenty of ordinary customers who fit that description. Yang Chen, 30, came to buy a hat and a hoodie for her husband, who works at an internet company: “He just thinks the brand is comfortable and looks fairly simple, so he buys it a lot. But a lot of what's on the official site is limited-time and limited-quantity, so he always has to get up at midnight to refresh the page.”

Wang Xiaoguang, a senior at Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, used an internship in Beijing as a chance to see the store. “I like the way Zhiming dresses in Love in a Puff, and MDNS feels like that style to me. Plus the brand leans Japanese, the sizing and cut work for me, it's good value, and it's easy to mix and match.”

Attention is growing, but celebrity streetwear brands have not grown fast, online or off. Only in the past few years has the pace picked up at all.

Take two brands often mentioned in China: Edison Chen's CLOT (its own site calls it only a lifestyle brand), and Li Chen and Wilber Pan's NPC. CLOT was founded in 2003 and has just seven stores worldwide; beyond its own site, it opened a Tmall shop only this July. NPC, founded in 2009, has seven stores, in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Chengdu and Xi'an; it opened a Tmall shop last July, and also sells through its website and YOHO.

The slow pace has to do with where streetwear sits. Like luxury, a streetwear brand's most important assets are scarcity and personality.

“What it is dictates high operating costs — locations in core commercial districts, high demands on fabric, fast design turnover,” Wang Dusen, creative director of the brand Ellassay, once told the media.

Or, as the apparel-industry observer Wang Xuzhang told CBNweekly: “You can't put these brands side by side with mass-market clothing labels. The audience here is relatively small and fairly fixed. A style is usually made in a tiny run, and once it sells out it's gone for good. Fans can barely queue fast enough to grab it.”

To keep themselves apart from mass-market or fast-fashion clothing, streetwear brands lean on limited crossover collaborations, hunger marketing and a refusal to distribute widely. On that point, online and offline are no different.

Run well, the money is real. In an interview late last year, Edison Chen said his initial investment was HK$2.5 million (about 2 million yuan) and this year's revenue reached US$10 million (about 60 million yuan). According to media reports, NPC booked 2 million yuan in sales during the presale phase of last year's Double 11 shopping festival, and another 6.94 million yuan on the day itself, with 280,000 store visits.

By the incomplete tally of the Douban user “Full-Screen Back Garden,” at least 24 celebrities, counting those from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, now have a streetwear brand of their own.

MDNS and MADGIRL, fall/winter 2016

These tactics have also bred a gray market.

Take purchase limits. Word that MDNS was opening in Beijing had been going around since this summer, but the brand's Instagram account posted the details only the day before: the store would open at 10 a.m. on October 25; the first 80 customers could buy a Beijing-exclusive compressed T-shirt and attend a 3 p.m. meet-and-greet with Shawn Yue at Sanlitun's Orange Hall, where he would sign autographs. Other early customers could join the meet-and-greet but get no autograph.

Shen was a little down about missing the first 80, and could do nothing about the scalpers mixed into the crowd: “The first 80 got a blue wristband, and you needed it to get Shawn Yue's autograph. Some people took theirs and resold it right there in the crowd, 1,000 yuan each.”

Take hunger marketing. On the second day the store was still capping how many people could come in — three or four shoppers at a time — and after 6 p.m. it let no one else join the line.

In line we met several Taobao shop owners and WeChat sellers like Shen, whose business is mostly resale; some get around the Great Firewall to sell on Instagram. “With streetwear you watch the market — it's all speculation. Some limited editions you buy in at 2,000 yuan and the market will pay 6,000 or 7,000; pieces a celebrity has worn sell especially well.” Siji Chupin, a Taobao shop well known in resale circles, moves as many as 3,240 streetwear items a month.

None of this is unique to celebrity brands. Search #supremeforsale on Instagram and you get 750,000 posts about reselling Supreme. A reseller named Andre runs an Instagram account, Sole Street Sneaker Co., with 14,000 followers. A hoodie with the Box Logo, priced at US$150, resells for as much as US$500 to $600. A well-known streetwear magazine even shot a documentary about it, Sold Out, explaining how Supreme's resale market works.

The odd thing is that these red-hot “streetwear brands” belonged, historically, entirely to a subculture. The idea is imported; the original English is “streetwear” (or “street fashion”), built around T-shirts, jeans, caps and sneakers, and inseparable from hip-hop, graffiti, surfing and skateboarding. By the account of Bobby Hundreds, founder of The Hundreds, it grew in at least three waves:

• The first wave was the skate and surf brands born in Southern California in the 1980s and '90s, such as Stüssy;
• The second came in the mid-to-late 1990s, when streetwear turned toward street cultures abroad, Japan above all. Tokyo's Harajuku produced several classics in this period, including Hiroshi Fujiwara's Goodenough, Nigo's A Bathing Ape and Shinsuke Takizawa's Neighborhood, which went on to shape a number of New York labels;
• The third came after 2000, when the young people streetwear had first reached grew up and began speaking through brands of their own; the internet, meanwhile, carried streetwear to far more people.

There used to be only two ways to learn about these brands: stand in line outside a store and see and try the clothes yourself, or wait a month or two after a release and read a niche magazine. Most of the time the conversation about streetwear happened entirely underground. In Britain, young people in hoodies were for a while linked with “antisocial behavior” and barred from some public places.

Celebrity brands and social networks — Tieba, Instagram, Weibo — changed all that. They pulled the subculture into the mainstream and flattened everything. An ordinary person who dresses well can become a taste leader; and the moment a new Yeezy drops, someone on the other side of the planet can click a few times and buy it on eBay or Taobao.

The new generation of shoppers wants streetwear more, too. According to a 2015 streetwear market report from WeConnectFashion, the market was already worth US$75 billion in 2014, half of the entire sportswear market. Neda Whitney, a group director at R/GA, said in an interview: “Fashion is cyclical. We've been through this before — mixing high and low, low-end brands moving up. Street style, skate culture and hot celebrities are exactly what appeals to millennials. They chase individuality and don't put much stock in fixed fashion and cultural standards.”

Still, buying streetwear and loving streetwear are two different things. Zheng Wei, the former strategy director at Vice China, had reservations about the boom when he spoke to the media last year. “The difference is whether you're consuming streetwear or actually into it. Streetwear is only an extension of a subculture, and a culture needs an environment.”

“Once the internet age started, street culture stopped happening in the street. The way information travels has changed, for better and worse. The bad side is that when everything comes easily, people forget where it came from. There are too many people who don't know the story — take adidas Yeezy: it's far more popular in China than in Japan, but the people wearing Yeezys here probably can't name a single Kanye song.”

“In some ways this is no different from how people consume luxury goods,” Himm, founder of DOE, told QDaily.

Cover and body images from MDNS's Instagram, phone photography on site, and YouTube