Streetwear Brands Acquired by Luxury Groups
The 2017-2024 wave of luxury-group acquisitions reshaped streetwear ownership. Supreme to VF (and on to EssilorLuxottica), Stone Island to Moncler, Off-White to LVMH — here's what's now under big-fashion umbrellas.
- 01
Supreme
United States · 1994Supreme was founded by James Jebbia in April 1994 on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan, conceived as a clubhouse-meets-store for the city's hardcore skate scene. The original space — with its central open floor, low racks against the walls, and a security mirror that doubled as a fish-eye view of the room — was designed so skaters could roll in on boards without losing momentum. The original team included Mike Hernandez, Justin Pierce, Harold Hunter, and Gio Estevez. Within a year, the white-on-red Box Logo (lifted in spirit from Barbara Kruger's agitprop typography) had become a uniform.
- 02
Stone Island
Italy · 1982Stone Island was founded in 1982 in Ravarino, Italy, by Massimo Osti — a graphic designer who had spent the late 1970s developing dyeing and treatment techniques for his earlier brand C.P. Company. Osti named Stone Island after Joseph Conrad's novel 'The Mirror of the Sea' and conceived it as a parallel project where he could push experimental garment-dyeing further than C.P. Company allowed.
- 03
Off-White
Italy · 2012Off-White was founded by Virgil Abloh in Milan in 2013, evolving out of his earlier project Pyrex Vision. Abloh — a Ghanaian-American architect by training who had worked closely with Kanye West as the creative director of DONDA — used Off-White as a thesis project for what he called 'the 3% approach': taking an existing object and shifting it just enough that the difference becomes the design. Quotation marks around words ('SCULPTURE', 'SHOELACES'), industrial zip ties on product, the diagonal stripe motif — all became immediately recognizable codes.
- 04
Y-3
France · 2003Y-3 was founded in 2002 as a creative joint venture between Adidas and Yohji Yamamoto — at the time an unprecedented kind of partnership between a sports-performance company and an avant-garde fashion designer. The name combines the Y of Yamamoto's name with the 3 stripes of Adidas's mark; the brand's first runway collection was presented at Paris Fashion Week in October 2002, an event that legitimised what the broader industry would later call 'designer × sportswear' as a permanent product category.