Urban Legends

Streetwear’s growth into the global phenomenon that it is comes as the result of media-savvy kids who sample from around the world to discover unknown clothing brands and fashion trends. These shoppers are students, artists, musicians, DJs, wannabe DJs, skateboarders, break dancers, and everyday people with the requisite money, vanity, and sense of irony. Though they rabidly follow their favorite industry, they are not “followers” themselves. Says Selkoe, “Streetwear customers are connoisseurs,” adding that, in his own closet, “I have probably 100 pairs of sneakers.”

Loosely defined, streetwear is utilitarian clothing that’s artfully flashy and moderately expensive (Selkoe’s banana T-shirt retails for almost 60 bucks). In many ways it represents the three-way union of hip-hop, hipsterdom, and haute couture, manifested in things like Technicolor sneakers, hoodies, and T-shirts, made in limited editions by obscure designers from around the globe. What it’s not is all gold teeth and Swarovski crystals. Rather, it borrows as much from Japanese anime and Brazilian baile funk as it does from punk and high fashion. Like pornography, explains Dina, “you know it when you see it.”

Even more than other kinds of high fashion—and due to its steep prices and designer exclusivity, some of this stuff is unmistakably high fashion—streetwear is ephemeral. As soon as trends are recognized on a bigger stage, such as a major magazine or a runway, they’re obsolete. A large part of streetwear’s appeal is the underground factor, the idea that only the truly cool know the truly cool brands (which, by extension, are not the ones sold at the chain stores). The typical streetwear buyer wants to feel as if he or she has stumbled upon something special, and to be spoon-fed glossy advertisements is to be denied the self-satisfaction of discovering something through a friend’s e-mail, or that cool blog, or that semi-obscure celebrity who mentioned in a zine interview where he got his pants. It’s like how buying a wooden owl from a kid on the sidewalk feels a lot better than buying that same wooden owl from Anthropologie.

“Giant corporations help kill trends by turning them into profit and mass consumerism,” says Oliver Mak, co-owner of (offline, small, and very hot) Symphony neighborhood sneaker boutique Bodega. “Something will be hot on the streets, then Middle America buys imitations of it online, and the trend ends up on a kid in Minnesota trying to emulate what he saw in Nylon. [But] the streets have already moved on to the next thing.”

Despite Karmaloop’s scant promotional budget (currently only one full-time marketer), or perhaps because of it, it’s succeeded in the same way that a traditionally advertised company would, i.e., lots of customers buying lots of clothes for lots of money. And yet—and here’s the real trick—it has managed to get big and famous without scaring off its elusive target: the discerning, skittish cool kid who prides himself on smelling The Man from a mile away.

“Dina and I are in our early thirties and we wear this stuff all the time,” says Selkoe. “So do most of our friends.” But typical Karmaloop shoppers, according to Selkoe, are 18 to 25. They’re male and female “alpha consumers”: socially influential, culturally diverse, “early adopting” kids (in a generous sense of the word) who demand the newest gear and can handily get it online. (As of 2005, there’s a brick-and-mortar Karmaloop flagship store on Newbury Street, but 95 percent of the company’s business is conducted through its website.) And now that former scenesters are growing up but not dressing up, what once was an open-and-then-closed window is now an elastic gateway. Adult rappers like Kanye West, Talib Kweli, and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels are all regular Karmaloop shoppers, as is troubled man-child Owen Wilson (who “bought, like, five pairs of jeans before he tried to kill himself,” Selkoe says, “so hopefully that didn’t have anything to do with that”). Also, Robin Williams is another celebrity fan: “He shopped with us, like, 15 times.”

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