The SoHo Kids: A Timeline of Timeless Cool
We chart the New York stoop dwellers and the stores, sounds, and streetwear trends that defined them.
SoHo is marked by its porous borders: Houston Street to the north, Canal Street to the south, and Lafayette Street and Sixth Avenue to the east and west. But the globally recognized neighborhood is more than an outline on the map. From the late ’70s to the early aughts, when the area underwent a transformation from an industrial zone to an artist mecca, SoHo was an epicenter for street style and culture. Today, it’s downtown’s city center — a vibe, a vision, and a concept proliferated by generations of kids who’ve kept tabs on the neighborhood. From the OG gender-disrupting designer Willi Smith to the Supreme skaters who’ve been setting trends for decades, SoHo’s streetwear scene has never gone out of style. Nor have the physical bones of the neighborhood: the cobblestone streets and the cast-iron building facades whose colonnaded ground floors form the perfect backdrop for the thousands of shoppers who come to see and be seen.Â
To find out why SoHo is and has always been the place, we’ve created a timeline of the neighborhood’s fashion notables, and the scenes and shops that surround them, from the 1980s to now. Â
Willi Smith and the Birth of Streetwear
Philadelphia-born Willi Smith got his start interning for an established couturier before attending Parsons, but he looked to the streets, not the elites, to establish his vision. Along with friend and collaborator Laurie Mallet, the designer launched his brand, WilliWear, in 1976; two years later, Smith held his first runway show at SoHo’s Holly Solomon Gallery. But it wasn’t until 1983, when Smith dropped “Street Couture,” that the openly queer designer made a major splash with his high-low mix of bright colors and bold silhouettes that traversed the office and the streets. Smith would go on to become one of the most successful Black designers of his era, blurring age-old gender divisions and inspiring generations of designers to come with artist collabs featuring Christo, Nam June Paik, Keith Haring, Spike Lee, and more.Â
Nicola Pelly and Harry Parnass Bring New Wave to New York
In 1977, Montreal-based British fashion designer Nicola Pelly and architect Harry Parnass founded Parachute, an avant-garde clothing line inspired by utilitarian military aesthetics. In 1980, they brought their international business to a converted industrial space in SoHo, where New Wave artists such as Duran Duran and David Bowie fell in love with the designers’ big shoulders and billowy silhouettes. Parachute quickly became an epicenter for downtown art and nightlife aficionados who hung around venues like TriBeCa’s Mudd Club and CBGB throughout the 1980s.Â
Street Style Meets the Scrap Yard
In the early 1980s, politically inclined street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were taking their revolutionary work off the block and into the galleries of SoHo; but the war on graffiti, declared by New York mayor John Lindsay in 1972, was far from over. By the 1990s, the once-clandestine art of bombing was more popular than ever. Graf artists were no longer relegated underground, and new venues, including the paint shop and apparel store Soho Down & Under, were becoming hubs for artists to link up, buy supplies, and flex their ’fits. Eventually, Soho Down & Under would become Bomb the System, a provocation that enamored the shell toe and StĂĽssy-wearing kids who hung around the shop and agitated the undercover cops who staked out the scene nearby. Today, that kiosk is called Scrap Yard, a name that refers to the MTA disposal sites that were once a hotbed for bombers — though now, with easy access to paint online, it’s all about the merch.Â
James Jebbia Skates His Way Into SoHo
Supreme skaters have been grinding the streetwear scene for over 25 years, but their founding father, James Jebbia, isn’t known for his parts. The UK-raised business mogul got his start as a shop boy at Parachute after moving to New York in the early 1980s. There, he witnessed the intersection of sound, style, and the streets, taking his eye for ’fits and finessing it into opportunities to open Union NYC, StĂĽssy, and, later, his very own SoHo storefront. When Jebbia founded Supreme in 1994, it was a nag champa-scented hangout for cool kids and misfits — such as the 19-year-old Harmony Korine, who cast the store’s clerks as characters in the 1995 Larry Clark–directed cult classic, Kids. Notable was the charismatic Zoo York–sponsored skater Harold Hunter, who grew up in the East Village, and ChloĂ« Sevigny, a teenage it-girl fresh off a Mercer Street runway show for another subcultural streetwear brand, Kim Gordon’s X-Girl.Â
Chloë Sevigny, Mary Frey, and the Liquid Sky Ravers
Meanwhile, at Liquid Sky, Kids star Sevigny, as well as a few extras from the film, were holding court at the SoHo-based raver store-cum-Temple Records shop founded by Brazilian DJ Carlos Soul Slinger and his wife, Claudia Rey. (The couple borrowed the name for their outpost, whose logo was an alien cartoon with a heart-shaped hole for a crotch, from the 1982 cult classic sci-fi film of the same name.) It was the time of club kids — when megavenues like Limelight competed with underground parties like NASA at Shelter — and Liquid Sky, with its authentic techno roots and outsized parachute pants, was the perfect fit. In 1992, a new SoHo location and a new girlfriend-turned-collaborator Mary Frey helped Soul Slinger expand his astrogirl-adorned empire, turning the shop into a de facto daytime afters for ravers all over the city.Â
Enter the Blogosphere
By the early aughts, SoHo was more outdoor mall than seedy subcultural zone, but that didn’t stop a new crop of teens from hitting the streets to show off their ’fits. Hip-hop had officially entered the mainstream, and luxury streetwear brands such as FUBU, Rocawear, Phat Farm, and, later, Sean John and BAPE could be found in department stores like Nordstrom and Macy’s. It was the time of tall tees, fitted hats, and baggy denim, and OG photographers like Brooklyn-born Jamel Shabazz, who had become famous for documenting Black fashion throughout the ’80s and ’90s, were there to witness the revolution. But along with the gentrification of SoHo came the arrival of a new street style venue: blogs and social media platforms. A fresh crop of photographers and bloggers including Heron Preston and the late Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh, were exporting SoHo street style across the globe, drawing to the scene future designers, like HBA’s Shayne Oliver and LUAR’s Raul Lopez, both virtually and IRL.Â
Been Trill, Hood by Air, and the Next Gen of Streetwear
Around 2010, a new fashion collective and DJ crew including Abloh, Preston, Matthew M. Williams, and Justin R. Saunders cropped up online. #BEEN #TRILL offered merch for a new generation of hypebeasts with their eyes on the hip-hop-inspired street style of yesteryear and the internet trends of the 2010s. It was a meme, a hashtag, a GIF, and even a pop-up on Canal Street, where a kiosk normally inhabited by Gucci knockoffs became a hotspot to score high-priced drip while rubbing shoulders with Kanye West’s entourage. (Rumor had it that the anonymous Been Trill member YWP was none other than Ye himself.) At the same time, Hood by Air, founded by New York blogger Oliver and Brooklyn-born designer Lopez in 2006, was beginning to take hold of the rap scene; but it wasn’t until HBA and Been Trill collaborated that A$AP Rocky wore both brands, catapulting them to viral status virtually overnight.
The Clout Corridor
Through the 2010s, SoHo continued to be ground zero for up-and-coming designers. Shops such as VFILES and Opening Ceremony provided platforms for young brands with an edge, plus stoops for their fans to hang out on. For kids like Kerwin Frost, a Harlem-born hypebeast who got his start flipping Supreme drops, SoHo’s “Clout Corridor” became a runway and a place to link up, smoke blunts, and take ’fit pics. Instagram was popping off, and New York kids such as Mike the Ruler, Bloody Osiris, and Luka Sabbat, who got his first break modeling for the Yeezy Season 1 fashion show, were becoming major influencers. By the end of the decade, SoHo was more of a concept than a place: Anyone could be a SoHo kid, as long as they had good fashion sense and the right strategy to promote it.Â
The TikTok Generation
When everything is trending all at once, it takes more than a great look to influence the masses. That’s why TikTok vloggers like Maurice Kamara of @thepeoplegallery and Johnny Cirillo of @watchingnewyork have turned their cameras to the streets in search of viral moments. Like modern-day flâneurs, they’ve become the eyes and ears of SoHo, seeking out celebrity ’fit checks and shareable interviews as a means of standing out in our frenetic fashion era. On the flip side, street style influencers turned stylists with a unique point of view such as Sierra Rena, Cjay Syre, and BeenSlackin are inspiring big brands to adopt ground-up aesthetics on the runway, a reminder that even in our information-stacked era, SoHo kids can still make their mark.
