New York City-based streetwear label Supreme was one of the first street labels to pierce through the luxury market, making streetwear acceptable among the fashion elite with limited runs of coveted designs, styles, and collaborations, including their most recent one with Louis Vuitton. And now it looks like Supreme is the first streetwear label to do it again, this time in the rarefied world of luxury art auctions.
On May 16th, one of France’s biggest auction houses, Artcurial, held an exclusive auction consisting mainly of rare Supreme items. Fittingly named after Wu-Tang Clan’s 1994 hit single, C.R.E.A.M (Cash Rules Everything Around Me), the auction explored 30 years of New York street culture through the lens of Supreme, arguably the one of the most important and influential streetwear brands ever created. And boy did the label live up to that title.
The auction brought in over $1 million in sales, with more than 145 unique items carrying price tags ranging from $200 to upwards of $100,000, including several rare Supreme box logo tees reserved at $1,800 a piece, a set of five Supreme x Damien Hirst skate decks reserved at $9,500, a punching bag made in collaboration with Everlast that went for $23,545, and a more recent Louis Vuitton x Supreme Malle Courrier 90 trunk with a reserve starting at a whopping $84,000 and that eventually sold for $103,321.
“The idea of the auction was to paint a landscape of three decades starting in the late 1980s,” said Artcurial Vice Chairman Fabien Naudan, who for the past two years travelled around the world to secure each individual piece for auction.
“The first decade was when street artists, skateboarders and DJ’s were experimenting [with art] without the idea of doing it for money, the next decade was when it became a business and the third one was the final step when it turned into a cash-out decade,” added Naudan, referring to Supreme’s $500 million sale to private equity firm Carlyle Group in October 2017.
Of course this supposedly being a deeper representation of all New York street culture, there were some non-Supreme items on hand as well, including sculptures by street artist Kaws and prints from Todd James. Naudan plans to hold a series of auctions in other cities solely dedicated to the unique undergrounds of each in the coming future. 
