Lee Delton Gunn V
Jason Crider
Hypermedia and Digital Rhetorics
12 February 2019
Supreme Box Logo as an Icon
Supreme is a popular, arguably the most popular, streetwear brand founded in and based out of SoHo in New York City. The brand was founded in 1994 by its creator, James Jebbia, with the inception of its flagship store on Lafayette street. Jebbia grew up in England and worked at the Duracell factory. On weekends, he would take his extra money from the week and travel to London where he would visit his favorite store. He enjoyed it because it “carries the cool stuff that everybody was wearing” in his own words (Ofiaza). This was prior to the creation of Supreme, which really started the movement of streetwear, but this store was the early model upon which Jebbia would build his brand.
He still to this day would consider himself just an owner of a skate shop, and that is how the store started out. It was staffed by young, affluent, skaters who were heavily opinionated and often a part of what would be deemed the ‘counter-culture.’ The store would play clips from old skate videos, blast music, and the employees felt that it was more of a hang-out spot for them that also happened to sell clothes. The purpose of this, apart from Jebbia’s personal enjoyment of skate culture, was to create a brand which was “less commercial” (Ofiaza). Jebbia realized that he had created a unique product in his brand, and taking a note from Gucci, he created a product that was a slightly better than the rest of the market and charged a lot more for it. His market was skaters who would wear cheap ripped jeans and Louis Vuitton hoodies. While this was a niche segment, he used it to create a lot of buzz around his brand. What really accelerated this growth, however, was the use of collaborations with other brands that would be recognizable to people within this market segment. The most notable of these collaborations in terms of brand growth was with Comme des Garçons in 2012, and the pinnacle of the brands entry into the fashion world was the collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2017.
In terms of the brand as an icon, the most recognizable image is the Supreme box logo. It is a simple red rectangle with white lettering spelling ‘Supreme’, but this image can be recognized the world over. This image has been heavily circulated due to the brands popularity, difficulty to obtain, and counter-culture attitude. Jebbia worries about ‘overexposure’ and is concerned that too much circulation of the brand will decrease its value in the eyes of its customers and could unsettle its market position. “Supreme uses social media primarily as an exhibit space. ‘We’re not trying to overconnect ourselves,’ Jebbia says” (Sullivan). Supreme carefully manages their own social media but has relatively little control over the recirculation methods that may be employed by others. Using Gries’ iconographic tracking method, we can see that Supreme has fallen victim to the world of recirculating and remixing and may have lost some of its air of exclusivity and ‘coolness’ as a result.
For the purposes of this analysis, we will be following the methodology that Laurie Gries lays out in her article, Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research Method for Visual Rhetoric and Circulation Studies. We will be applying this way of analyzing an image to the Supreme Box Logo to see if we can draw any conclusions about the way this icon has been circulated and whether that has any possible implications on the brand. To begin, Gries defines circulation studies as “an interdisciplinary approach to studying discourse in motion”, seeming to imply that the message an image, text, or speech carries is adaptive and can change from person to person depending on their own interpretations and preconceptions. She transitions from this idea of circulation to her methodology of iconographic tracking with the help of a theory presented by Kevin Porter. “Porter argued that an utterance’s meanings do not exist a priori; rather an utterance’s meanings are the consequences it has in the world.” She takes this idea that an image (in Porter’s case an utterance) derives its meaning from the way it is received and applies that to the digital space.
This application brings about the inception of iconographic tracking which she defines as employing “traditional qualitative and inventive digital research strategies to (a) follow the multiple transformations that an image undergoes during circulation, and (b) identify the complex consequentiality that emerges from its divergent encounters.” All of this is to say that Gries wishes to define the different ways that an image is interpreted, the different lives it takes on, in order to grasp a better understanding of the true meaning of that image in more than just one context. To do so, she tracks the ways that an image is circulated, both geographically and rhetorically, and tries to draw inferences about the different meanings the image takes on in different media and locations.
In my implementation of this method with my research of the circulation of the Supreme box logo, I started on Google Images. My first search term was ‘Supreme box logo’ with the intention of just establishing a base line and adding some images of the original icon in order to follow some threads and hopefully better narrow my search. What was lucky for me, however, is that the target audience of Supreme is all eighteen to twenty-five. This group perfectly corresponds with the group most adept on digital spaces and the circulation and remixing of that image began with just this simple search. I changed the terms as I saw fit and the direction of my research became a bit clearer, but the deviations were small. Namely I searched for ‘Supreme’ and ‘Supreme humor.’ These search terms did not yield much differentiation in result, I assume due to the level of circulation even the remixed uses of the image have received. I then continued to different search engines which gave me similar direction, but different content, affirming the popular ways in which this image is remixed. I then turned to social media where I was able to make more general conclusions about the implications of the research I had done through the search engines.
An area where the work did not go as smoothly, however, was in determining the tags to include or leave out of the study. An initial inference that I had is that a possible significance could be found in the color of the background used on the logo. The classic color is red, and I thought that remixes which changed this to yellow or green or black etc. may have correspondence to its use, but this did not turn out to be the case and the color seems to largely correspond to aesthetics or collaboration decisions, without social implication.
The two most common remixes of the classic logo are to replace the ‘Supreme’ lettering with either ‘F*ck Trump’ or ‘Harambe’. Represented here are two social issues which correspond well with the intended demographic of the brand. Most counter-culture skaters are not big fans of the current president and would be in favor of animal rights, feeling that the treatment of Harambe was an excessive use of force for the situation. Further insight into the consumers of the brand can be reflected in the two most popular corresponding terms for my ‘collaboration’ tag. They are Louis Vuitton and Bape (or A Bathing Ape). Louis Vuitton, as most people would recognize, is an extremely highly priced luxury brand. Bape, while lesser known, is a popular and beloved brand among streetwear enthusiasts which is based out of Japan. These two grant us insight into the positioning of Supreme as a luxury brand which has a focus on exclusivity and likes the fact that it is not a household name.
The next correlation, however, is where the brand has begun to run in to problems. It is between the tags ‘likely fake’ and ‘Louis Vuitton’. The positioning of the brand in this premium segment, with resale prices sometimes reaching ten times the original sale price (incredibly high to begin with), has created a market for knock-off goods. These are extremely dangerous ‘remixes’ for a brand like Supreme as they threaten what really makes the brand special. That is the ideal which Jebbia originally founded the brand upon of it being “less commercial.” If everyone can obtain these products, or at least similar enough looking ones, for a reasonable price and further if everyone knows about the brand, the model begins to fail. The brand becomes the commercial entity which it set off afraid to become and there is little that differentiates a Supreme shirt from any other Hanes white tee.
These dangers are continued in an analysis of the social media of Supreme. The verified page of the company has stuck with the original ideals and keeps mostly to product images and photographs of the products in real life scenarios as promotion. The problem though is evident in the order of pages a search for the term ‘Supreme’ on Instagram returns. The first result, in fact, is not the company page but a remix of sorts in the form of “Supreme Patty.” This is a purposefully annoying character who adorns himself in Supreme gear and then performs ridiculous stunts such as juicing limes into his eyes. The second result is the brand page, but the third result is an account which forecasts the release of new Supreme products so that consumers are able to purchase them at retail before they enter the highly volatile and often over-priced retail market. Supreme’s own exclusivity strategy has led to the rise of these accounts and has increased the ‘velocity’, as Ridolfo and DeVoss would deem it, of the spread of remixed content. This has resulted in some of the fear of the brand becoming ‘mainstream’ coming true and the fears of ‘overexposure’ that Jebbia laid out may be coming true, but from sources he cannot control.
Works Cited
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Hypermedia and Digital Rhetorics 
