The Supreme Sticker and Everything It Doesn’t Cover
A friend of mine is, without exaggeration, the most devoted Supreme collector I know. He doesn’t just own the shirts and the skatedecks—he has the towels, the keychains, the basketball, a brick with the logo molded into it. I don’t fully share the obsession but I understand the logic: buying into Supreme at that level is less about the objects than about belonging to a particular idea of cool at a particular moment, and that idea is powerful enough that people arrange their apartments around it.
Photographer Ahmad Smith took a different approach to the brand. He shot Erika Larson—art student, Brooklyn resident, person who apparently gives zero fucks—wearing essentially nothing: topless except for a Supreme logo sticker placed over one nipple, with her full natural bush presented directly at the camera in at least one frame. The series was shot for Sticks & Stones and it’s exactly as good as it sounds.
The shoot works because Larson looks like she’s using Supreme, not the other way around. The sticker is a prop, maybe a joke, definitely a statement about the relationship between branding and bodies and what gets covered and what doesn’t. She holds her ground with the kind of ease that makes the whole thing feel less like a photo shoot and more like a fact of nature. Here is a person. Here is her body. There’s a logo involved but it doesn’t change the fundamentals.
I’ve been slowly coming around to Supreme’s appeal—the scarcity model, the cult identity, the way the red rectangle has colonized fashion culture so thoroughly that it now appears in places like this. Watching someone use the logo as decoration on naked skin, as both branding and punctuation, feels like the most honest thing you can do with a streetwear icon: strip away everything except the mark.
New York keeps producing people like this. Creative, unguarded, comfortable in their bodies in a way that feels almost aggressive if you’ve spent your life somewhere more careful. Larson works and dances and drinks and laughs and gets photographed topless for streetwear campaigns, and all of it is part of the same continuous life. The feminist reading and the horny reading aren’t in conflict here. They’re the same reading.