How Stüssy Infiltrated the Downtown Streets of ’90s New York
From the clothes came the International Stüssy Tribe, which had organically formed when Shawn first met Paul at a trade show in Manhattan a few years prior. Shawn mentioned that he didn’t know anyone in the city, so Paul invited him out to dinner. The two became fast friends. “A night or two later, I took him out to some nightclubs. He started meeting my friends, and I guess in a very random way that’s how the whole ‘Stüssy Tribe’ thing really started,” recalled Paul. The International Stüssy Tribe (IST) was born out of that group, Shawn’s growing worldwide friendships, and others like it. The designer started to form bonds with many across the globe throughout his travels, “an oddball eclectic group of people,” as he later put it.
The IST started out small but grew alongside the brand’s reputation, expanding to include other young, style-inclined men from across the globe. Painters, taggers, photographers, models, record producers, musicians, DJs, club promoters, impresarios, and every type of urban scenester in between. These were the arbiters of emerging creative culture, the street style instigators of their respective cities. In New York, there was Paul, Dante Ross, Albee Ragusa, Jules Gayton, and Lono Brazil. London had a strong showing, including Michael Kopelman, Fraser Cooke, Mick Jones, Goldie, brothers James and Mark Lebon, and eventually Malcolm McLaren, the famed punk maestro behind the Sex Pistols. In Italy, there was Slam Jam founder and clothing distributor Luca Benini; in Tokyo, Shawn befriended Hiroshi Fujiwara, a globetrotting magazine writer and perhaps the first DJ to start playing American hip-hop in Japan.
The more time Shawn spent in the New York, the more covetable his designs became. “Shawn started looking at things a little bit differently when he started going to New York,” recalled Paul. “He started noticing these things and bringing them into Stüssy.” Shawn was deeply inspired by the city’s downtown fashion, which borrowed from every corner of the five boroughs—from Brooklyn to Harlem, from clubbers and taggers to rappers and skaters. No one was quite sure what to call the look. It was an amalgam of several styles, a deliberate collision of seemingly disparate elements cobbled together from army-navy stores, sneaker outlets, and classic workwear shops. It was traditional Northeasterner gear worn in a distinctly modern way. No one in the International Stüssy Tribe had the cash to spend on designer fashion so it was how you put together an outfit that was the best way to express your style. “I don’t think of myself as a designer by any means,” Shawn said at the time. “I’m a clothing man who makes what he and his friends like to wear…Me and my friends don’t put much money into clothes.” A Stüssy ad from the era showed five IST members—painter caps, B-boy jackets, cuffed denim—posing in front of a tagged SoHo stoop. It marked an inflection point: Stüssy was no longer just a surf brand.
