Supreme City of Inspiration

My new year’s resolution this year was to make more inspirational trips. As a creative person, to refuel your creative input is so much more important than you could ever imagine. I know this to be 100% true, yet I can’t seem to find the time or make it a priority to do them. But this year is going to be different.

Last weekend I finally got my head out of my ass and booked a trip to London. It’s a city that I can’t believe I haven’t visited more often. It’s just around the corner from Sweden and has everything you could ever want in a city, and more. But in the past I’ve made more trips to New York than to London – shame on me.

For me the best way to travel for inspiration is alone. Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel with my family, friends or just me and my girlfriend. But for inspiration I’d rather do it alone. Because, let’s face it, you never know where or how you’ll get inspired. Personally, I can end up hanging out at a small corner Vintage shop for hours looking at old T-shirts, or just sitting in a park staring at people for the better part of a day. No matter how much I love my kids, I’d rather have them safe and sound at home when this happens.

Whenever I go to a city where there’s a Supreme store, I always go there. Even though I pretty much know what’s going to be there and I usually end up not buying anything, it’s just one of those brands that I can’t show enough respect. They’ve done everything right from the day they opened their first shop on Lafayette street 1994.

When opening the store, James Jebbia, the founder of Supreme, started out by employing the best skaters in the area. Fine, they needed money, but what they really wanted to do was to skate, not work in a store. So, the legendary Supreme mentality started out by having staff that hated working, period. If someone walked through the door that they didn’t like or if someone looked at something and didn’t buy it, they would just ban them from the store or curse them out in front of their friends. For anyone else, that would be just bad business, plain and simple, but not for James, that behavior built a reputation for Supreme as being the brand you only got to wear if you where cool enough to actually be let in the store. Even though this is not really true today, that brand aura stuck, and rocking anything from Supreme still means you got let in the door because they thought you where cool enough. If that’s not inspirational, I don’t know what is.

At the end of the day we all draw inspiration from wherever we can find it. And, walking up to the Supreme store in London for the first time, I can’t help but noticing what street they chose to put their store at..