Union LA’s Chris Gibbs on the Golden Era of Japanese Streetwear in America
As part of Highsnobiety’s “Everything Is Streetwear” story and video series, we’re sharing a select number of our conversations with style insiders in full.
If you waited in line to buy BAPE in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, you know Chris Gibbs. If, like John Mayer, you were up on Visvim in the 2010s, you know Chris Gibbs. And if you want to learn more about the history of how cool people have dressed in the 21st century, you should talk to Chris Gibbs.
The creative director and owner of Union Los Angeles, Gibbs is Canadian by birth but learned about street style, retail, and consumer behavior at the store’s original location in New York. Opened in 1989 by James Jebbia and Mary Ann Fusco, Union was the trial-run for the pin-neat presentation of cool cult brands that was perfected at Supreme. Here, Gibbs discusses the past 20 years of his professional life, during which he became the owner of Union Los Angeles and set the standard for showcasing Japanese Urahara brands in America.
Everybody has their own definition of streetwear and I’m curious what yours is.
Damn, you started off with the question. Damn, motherfucker. I think for context — and this is a conversation that’s obviously been active lately — the architects of streetwear didn’t name it streetwear. It was named by someone else. And so depending on where you are on the spectrum, you may or may not have accepted that title. I have accepted it. I think the architects of streetwear were doing something very organic and weren’t interested in naming it. Codifying it is for commerce and for the bigger players to be able to put it in a bucket.
That being said, 20 some years later, there’s an undeniable movement around fashion that has a lot of sensibilities that are similar that people have called streetwear. And I’ll call it that too, because when someone asks me what kind of store I have: “Well, we’re a menswear boutique.” Well, so is John Varvatos, you know what I mean? We’re not that.
When I look at the silos of fashion: there’s luxury, there’s high fashion, workwear, military. I’ve always thought that streetwear is an offense through which you attack one of those silos. I never thought it was its own silo. And I think some of the proof is that you now have “luxury streetwear.” You don’t go to Balenciaga to buy a beautiful suit — you buy a hoodie with Balenciaga draped all over it. That’s the streetwear offense. If you call Balenciaga a streetwear brand, someone might get upset. But I would argue that today 90% of what they sell looks a lot like streetwear. We’re maybe coming out of it, but for the last 10 years, it’s been the most popular way of communicating style.
Take me back to Los Angeles in 2005. You had moved from New York to the west coast to work at Union Los Angeles.
I consider that the explosion of Japanese streetwear brands, like Neighborhood and BAPE and WTAPS. We were heavily selling Japanese brands that we had exclusively damn near in the world. And there was, unlike today, a kind of codified, trusted stable of smaller streetwear T-shirt brands. Today, it’s massive. There’s too many to name. [Back then] you could walk down the street and if you saw a kid wearing this certain coded stuff: “Oh, you know what’s up.” Today you can go buy that look, without being the look or knowing the look. This was when you had the look because you lived the life. You lived the part. You understood the players. You understood the communication. You understood the community.
There was a small, tight-knit group of retailers around the world that were representing this. Union, I think, almost singularly represented America. I think Hideout or Hit and Run in London represented it. There were a couple of other stores, maybe BOONTHESHOP in Korea early on and there was a store in Hong Kong—maybe 10 stores that sold this look and this way of life.
When you were saying “This person wasn’t buying the look” — could you assume that this person was skating? Could you assume they listened to a certain kind of music? What inferences could you make about who they were and where they came from based on how they were dressing?
Definitely music. As crazy as this sounds, I think people have really eclectic music taste [now]. They listen to punk, shoegaze, hip-hop, house — that’s become the norm. But in 2005, you were a hip-hop head, or you were a punk kid. And the common thread, the connective tissue, was someone who was hyphenated and in a really honest and organic way. And growing up as an ’80s baby, if you were a jock, you wouldn’t have a friend that was a skater. It just wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t go down.
But this movement happened. I lazily call it the downtown movement, and I’m referring to downtown New York in the ’90s, where all these misfits from these counterculture pockets came together. And there was an earnest curiosity of sharing culture, music, and activities, and we all partied together. And then fashion tendencies came out of that. You borrowed from each one in this really earnest way. It wasn’t a poser way, it wasn’t copying — it was genuine influence.
So is it fair to say that Union LA begins as an outpost of the downtown New York aesthetic, downtown cool, downtown community to Los Angeles?
Yeah. It’s almost literal. Eddie [Cruz] is a New Yorker from the Bronx who opened up Union in New York with James Jebbia. Union New York opened in ’89 — I didn’t start till ’96 — and I would argue if it wasn’t the first, it was one of the first streetwear stores in the world. [Cruz] moves out to LA and opens up that store here, so that’s bringing that movement here. Over the next ten to 15 years, LA not only adopted it, but it was allowed to grow here in a way that it wasn’t really allowed to grow in New York. And I think that’s largely due to economics.
Expand on that for me.
So when I think about a streetwear brand, the most robust and holistic version of that is a physical store selling the goods. And I look to Japan: Neighborhood had a store, WTAPS had a store, BAPE had a store. You go there and you’re immersed in their world. In New York, rents were too high. Where’s Subwear? Where’s Recon? Where’s Union? Union’s not even in New York anymore. Stussy’s still there. Supreme is still there, but the rent got crazy. Whereas here in LA, you could have a store and build your world and share it because you could afford the rent. And so it’s not a coincidence that a lot of streetwear brands after the ’90s wave were coming out of LA. They could afford to open up a little store on La Brea or on Virgil and figure it out. My humble opinion is streetwear was born in New York, but it came of age in LA. After the recession in 2010, Union closed in New York and never reopened — but we kept it going here. We could afford to push through a recession without massive overhead.
My humble opinion is streetwear was born in New York, but it came of age in LA.
How hairy did it get for you during the recession?
It was pretty bad. It was so bad that I was able to buy the store from Eddie because Eddie was going to shut it down. At one point I told Eddie, “Hey, I’m going to leave because I’ve got a family to raise.” And I had a plan to do my own thing. He was like, “Well, if you leave, I’m probably just going to shut it down. So why don’t you take whatever money and ideas you have that you were going to invest in your own thing, and take this over?” So, for me, the recession was the best opportunity and the best moment of my life. It changed my life forever.
That’s when I really, really doubled down on Japanese stuff. My career is highly tethered to my commitment to Japanese Urahara brands. That’s what really dug us out of our recession. At the time it was counter-intuitive to invest in expensive brands, which is what we did. We stopped selling T-shirts. And to be quite frank, we’ve never fully rebooted our T-shirt program — and T-shirts are streetwear straight, no chaser. We never really rebooted it, because cut-and-sew clothing and fabrics from foreign lands are what got us through this really tough time and laid the foundation for who we are today.
Before you talked to Eddie, what was your plan? Were you going to set yourself up with a new brick-and-mortar?
Yes. I had a new brick-and-mortar and was planning on diving in. And the offense I ended up using is what I used at Union.
I dove head first into Urahara brands. For a good 10 years, my career was singularly tethered to Visvim. It was a brand I loved and understood. I had a really good relationship with Hiroki [Nakamura], and from 2010 to 2017, maybe 2018, maybe 50% of our revenue was Visvim.
I was actually talking to Eddie just yesterday, and he was talking about what he called anchor brands. I spoke to James Jebbia recently as well, he said the same thing. He was like, “The success of Union and its longevity is directly related to us always having at least one anchor brand that we could depend on for sales.” In the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was Stussy. And in the aughts, it was Visvim.
In 2005, to come full circle to how we started this conversation, it would’ve been BAPE with a fucking bullet. There’s been nothing that we’ve had before or since that was as successful as Bathing Ape in that era. I’ve never ordered more of a brand from a dollar point of view than our orders with BAPE, and it would evaporate in a day. No social media, no e-comm, straight up brick and mortar. For a good five years it was our anchor brand.
Did people line up?
Yeah, it was crazy. People used to say I made people cry. It wasn’t my intention. Our thing was like, “You can only buy in your size.”
Was it hoodies?
The camo hoodies. The first time I went to Japan for the BAPE buy, I remember looking at the line sheet. Most brands will give you minimums — if you’re not going to order at least 20 of this item, you can’t get it. My first Bathing Ape order there was a maximum, and I had never seen that. They were limiting how much you could buy. The BAPE hoodie, they make it in the green camo, purple, blue, red, and a multi-cam. And I remember reading that the maximum was one, and I’m trying to speak to a guy: “Sumimasen, do you mean one per color per size?” “No, one.” Aka, you want this hoodie? Pick a size and a color. That’s the genesis of why someone’s crying later on in line at Union. Those days were funny.
Did you have celebrities coming to the store?
In that era, most of the celebrities weren’t even aware. Funny enough, early on John Mayer was really into BAPE and Neighborhood. [Then] he evolved into Visvim. That’s a more normal pattern than you would think.
Later on, obviously Kanye got really into the stuff, and he was an early adopter. Mos Def was always in the niche group. You think of him as a celebrity now, but I think of him more as just a friend. He used to buy Complete Finesse, which was an early Hiroshi brand.
When did you first encounter Visvim?
I had moved to LA, and Visvim was selling shoes only and they were selling them at Undefeated; Eddie was really into the brand. I remember my first reaction was not a positive one. “Those look weird. It’s a moccasin with a fucking sneaker.” It had to grow on me. When I really got it, it was on one of those early trips to Japan where I got to be in their world.
Would any of the Japanese designers and brand owners come visit you guys in LA?
Hiroshi [Fujiwara] and Eddie Cruz were legitimately really good friends. Basically every Urahara brand that we carried was an introduction from Hiroshi. I’m Eddie’s employee, and at some point Hiroshi called me Eddie-deshi. He meant it as a joke and I received it as that, but deshi literally translated is the sumo wrestler’s servant, the guy that wipes the sumo wrestler’s ass. So I was Eddie’s deshi, but I took it as a term of endearment. In that era, to buy Japanese brands you had to go to Japan. You weren’t ordering online. And what the Japanese really wanted was a personal relationship with you. So I became really good friends with Hiroki, with Hiroshi, with Shin from Neighborhood, with TET from WTAPS.
With Visvim in particular, we were doing two trunk shows a year where Hiroki would come to town, we’d rent out the Chateau Marmont, we’d do a whole thing. We had a bunch of big-ticket buyers like John Mayer, for example. No one that was really famous because the trunk shows are a pre-book, and when you’re rich and famous you don’t want to buy something and wait six months for it. It was mainly well-off gentlemen with taste. There was a designer from Apple that was really into it. One of the owners of that brand Incase. The creative side of Hollywood. Actors don’t usually spend a lot of money on clothing; they get a lot of it for free. It was more like the creatives: the directors, the editors. Some people were upwards of $20,000 a season on Visvim.
How did you learn to navigate and maneuver in Japan?
That adage about learning how to swim and they just throw you in the water? Literally, I got thrown in. My first trip out, Eddie gave me this burner, like an old Nokia phone, and it had everyone’s name in it. “If you want call NIGO, there’s his info.” “If you want to call Hiroshi….” I wish I had that phone to this day. I tell people today that I know Tokyo better than I know Los Angeles and New York — because I had to. It was a wonderland of brands and stores. I was just overwhelmed. It was the dopest thing. I remember watching Tokyo Vice, which is set in the late ’90s, but that energy was there; watching that show, it was bringing all these emotions back. It’s still my favorite city to go to.
