Streetwear culture has always transcended the particularities of any single city or nation. Every style, every trend, arises from a long process of cross-cultural pollination across both countries and continents. But if streetwear culture transcends national boundaries, are streetwear markets similarly unified?
On the occasion of our international expansion into Europe, we dug deep into our data, attempting to quantify the degree of similarity across international markets. For each of the last 10 months, we identified the top-selling sneaker and streetwear item in the U.S., the U.K., and the rest of Europe, to see what patterns emerge. In a previous article, presented the results of our sneaker analysis. Below, we focus on streetwear:
Unlike the international sneaker market, which showed a high degree of uniformity across the three regions, the international streetwear market appears far more fragmented. In the sneaker market, the same colorway topped the best-seller list in each region in 6 of the last 10 months. For streetwear, there wasn’t a single month where the same item appeared atop all three lists. The closest thing to an international consensus occurred in May, when the top-selling item in all 3 regions was a black Supreme bag – a waist bag (in Europe and the U.K.) and a shoulder bag (in the U.S.).
The only other instance of partial consensus occurred in September when the Supreme x Commes des Garcons box logo tee was a top-seller in both Europe and the U.K. But in every other month, the best-selling streetwear item in each region was different.
As StockX expands into Europe, and our continental customer base expands, our insight into the culture differences between these two markets will only increase. It will be fascinating to see what, if anything, changes as StockX establishes itself as the safest and easiest secondary sneaker market on both sides of the Atlantic.
