Earlier this week, Supreme released their official FW20 lookbook and with the very first shot, Supreme set the tone for Fall Winter 2020 season. The first image features Supreme skate team member Sage Elesser with a particularly grim look on his face, wearing what could potentially be the most hype Supreme piece of the year: the Cross Box Logo Hoodie. The Supreme Box Logo is by far the most revered brandmark in streetwear and perhaps one of the most recognizable in the world. With the announcement of the Supreme Cross Box Logo, Supreme is looking us dead in the eyes, similar to Sage in the photo, and asking us to question what the traditional Box Logo really is. While that question will be left for us to answer individually, this is something we’ve truly never seen before.
If anything has ever been sacred in the world of streetwear, it’s been the credibility of the Supreme Box Logo. In the past, this credibility has led to conversations around what exactly constitutes a “Box Logo” as opposed to something that merely has a very similar design. A recent example of this argument came during SS20 with the release of the Supreme Cutout Logo, which features a cutout Box Logo on the chest. Upon release, the internet was lit aflame with the debate. Was it a Box Logo or not? The general consensus was no, the Cutout Logo was deemed not worthy of the “Box Logo” title and considering it such would violate the sanctity of the logo itself. A more difficult to answer scenario comes in the form of Supreme’s collaborative Witch T-shirt with Undercover, which features the Wicked Witch Of The West from The Wizard Of Oz melting behind a green Box Logo. Though the t-shirt now fetches prices on average of more than $700 USD and looks to be a Box Logo in every way, shape, and form, it’s technically not, at least according to those who’ve been following the brand for a long time. The discrepancy between a Box Logo and an item that is not a Box Logo isn’t simply subjective though, neither the Supreme Cutout Logo Crew or the Undercover Witch t-shirt officially feature any messaging from Supreme including the words “Box Logo” and though they seem to fit into the category, Supreme didn’t bless them with the title.
This does not mean that Supreme hasn’t done their own modifications to their famed logomark in the past. Just this spring, Supreme released a collaborative Box Logo t-shirt with Takashi Murakami that featured the artist’s “Skulls and Flowers Red” artwork, and last winter the brand applied a bandana print to the logo’s background. To this point, the next most revolutionary modifications made to the Box Logo have all likely come through the way of Comme des Garçons collaborations. In 2012, Supreme collaborated with CDG for the first time, allowing the brand to flip their logo backward, delivering the most modified version of the logo until 2018. In 2018, Comme des Garçons took things a step further with the release of the split Box Logo, which featured a Frankensteined, cut-up and restitched Box Logo t-shirt. The Supreme Cross Box Logo is the first time that Supreme has made a modification of this sort to their logo outside of a collaboration which suggests that in the future we can only expect them to get even more creative with their most revered design.
