I don’t have to tell you that there is a line at the Supreme store. The bucket hats dot the west side of Fairfax all the way up to Rosewood, their owners exuberant but kind enough to leave gaps for their kindred spirits streaming into Diamond Supply or Crooks & Castles, the other streetwear brands that have found a home here. I weave through as best I can, careful to sidestep the idling skateboards. I’m wearing an old Dallas Stars jersey, and some guy keeps yelling “Go Ducks!” at me, but I don’t have time to stop and argue. I’m here for Future.
I could have asked why exactly Supreme had drawn such a crowd on a weekday afternoon, but after you’ve lived in Los Angeles for long enough, there’s a sort of fashion fatigue that seeps into your bones. So I keep walking south, past Supreme, past the Schwartz Bakery and the famous deli, Canter’s, and cross over to the east side of the street. My destination is hard to miss, a block of purple and the name, written in that borrowed Prince font from the mixtape: PURPLE REIGN. Future’s L.A. pop-up shop is a collaboration with the clothing brand Cease & Desist, which was founded in 2012 and aims to marry streetwear to the allure of high fashion. Purple Reign opened March 10 and will be around through this coming Sunday, and it’s the best-prepared merch booth you’ve ever laid eyes on.
Its address will read familiar to area rap fans. Until January of last year, 410 N Fairfax was home to the Odd Future store, where Tyler, the Creator made a quarter-mil off socks. Though the area is now best known to outsiders as this sort of nexus for streetwear, it’s actually more historically important as one of the main arteries of Jewish life in L.A. So what you get is a weird hybrid of the storied and the stylish, and the Bagel Broker parking lot I leave my car in is swarming with youths who spend much more money on clothes than I do. (There’s an Israeli flag outside of Solomon’s Judaica book store, and I’m pretty sure it was made by Huf.)
Despite the controlled hype at Supreme, the atmosphere in and around Purple Reign is relatively quiet. Part of this is undoubtedly due to me arriving at noon on a Thursday, after the store has been open for more than 48 hours. Inside is a small cadre of employees, almost none of whom are used to retail. These are higher-ups in Future’s record imprint, Freebandz, or in Cease & Desist, people who have an interest in the creative quality of the items available here, in their financial potential, or both. When you couple those stakes with the slow trickle of guests, the attention each customer gets is unusual. And it works: Despite unremarkable turnout, nearly every party that entered the store during my time there leaves with at least one item of clothing.
The clothes, as the staff correctly points out, are of a higher quality than you would expect to find at a standard tour’s merch booth. The conceit is different, too: Freebandz pants, sweaters, and the like are meant to be versatile rather than simply to signify fandom. And some of the items — the bomber jackets, in particular — are notable for their feel, which seems to come from genuinely high-quality material. Other pieces, like the white Cease & Desist-branded shirts that are printed with the definition of the word “reign,” are free of explicit reference to the rapper or his label at all; an excited staffer claims that this is the shirt Future is wearing onstage at each show on his current Purple Reign tour.
The slow pace allows me to spend some time talking to Fred Foster, the owner and creative director of Cease & Desist. Foster cuts an interesting figure, his face framed by round tortoise-shell glasses and gold fronts on his bottom teeth. He explains that the aim of the Freebandz/C&D co-venture is to make “competitive loungewear,” which just happens to be tied to the one of the most influential hip-hop artists in the world. Also on display are, or will be throughout the week, parts of collections from two more up-and-coming clothing brands, RSVP and DOPE, and a series of shirts called “the Freebandz Rock TEE Collaboration with Future & Nxllz and Dbruze.” The latter puts Future squarely in the middle of what look like the most beautifully gaudy concert merch of the early ‘90s.
As Foster and I snake through the small space, we dodge more bucket hats and their carefully framed Snapchats. The entire store was constructed in only a weekend, and yet there are clever finishing touches, like the tag boasting that the rug on the floor is made of alpaca and worth $20,000. The rest of the art isn’t just on-theme — it’s bizarrely, mesmerizingly intricate to Future. On the north wall of the store are two sets of hands — one pouring lean from a Sprite bottle into a double cup, the other blowing bubbles of Actavis (the only thing that relaxes Future, remember), with a bottle remade to fit Freebandz specifications. Both pieces are by the Texas-based artist Sergio Garcia, who unveiled versions of each at Art Basel in Miami. On the opposite wall is a medium-sized collage by an artist who’s either a huge Atmosphere fan or is actually named Lucy Ford; Foster tells me the piece was colored, in part, with codeine, and that parts of a Gucci iPhone case have been painted into the finished product.
Somehow that’s not the end of the fixation on cough syrup. When you walk inside Purple Reign, you’re facing a wall of styrofoam cups. There they are, pasted to the drywall in pairs of two, from the floor to the ceiling. While Future has at times been the target of age-old arguments about rap “glorifying” destructive behavior, it’s clear to fans that his music explores just how painful and isolating addiction can be. But seeing the signifiers of that addiction stripped of their context and repurposed here makes them ring hollow, and at times feels opportunistic.
For a while, I mill up and down the block, speaking to the customers going into and coming out of the store. Fans who I caught both before and after were uniformly pleased with the quality of the merchandise. Jahlil, a 22-year-old student at Santa Monica College, tells me that this will be the first rapper-branded clothing he’ll wear outside of a concert setting. “It actually looks like something where you’re not a dummy,” he says. Kathryn, who asks that I not say the name of her high school after her friend points out she’s supposed to be there, adds, “It’s way cooler than I thought it would be.”
After hanging around a bit longer — and debating the relative merits of Beast Mode and 56 Nights with three fans — I dip into Canter’s for a Reuben sandwich. The deli is packed with crew members and onlookers from a movie shoot taking place outside, the prevailing wisdom being that it’s last-minute reshoots for the new Barbershop. Two bucket hats wander in, one carrying a bag from Supreme. Seeing how long the line will be, he asks his friend if they should hit the Odd Future store before they go home. “Dude, no, it’s gone,” the other says. “It’s Future now.” I can’t hear if the one with the bag says anything in response, and they disappear. But by the time I leave with my lunch, I can make them out across the street, trying on hoodies.