Trending now: the cult of the queue

New York

THEOLUS Jackson slouched against the stanchion separating him from the entrance of Supreme, the streetwear emporium on Lafayette Street in SoHo. He had registered on the company's website to pick up a ticket assuring him a spot near the head of a line that by 10am that day spooled around the corner towards Broadway.

Wearing loose trousers, a football jersey and earbuds, he bided his time. "Most of the time I have my music, so I'm not bothered," Mr Jackson said. "I come every week - I like the vibe - and I just chill." The ostensible draw for Mr Jackson and his comrades on that balmy June morning - the so-called "drop" or news - prompting a couple of hundred fashion diehards to snap open their wallets, was a jacket (US$298) and companion shirt (US$158), stamped with the image of a Richard Prince-inspired cowpoke, which sold out within moments after 11, when Supreme opened its doors.

Did it matter? Not much. Though upmarket streetwear - hoodies, sneakers, skateboards, ball caps, sanitation-worker boiler suits - is the ostensible lure for these hunter-gatherers, the wares are just part of the draw. "These kids don't come to go into the store," said Jeff Carvalho, the executive editor of Highsnobiety, a content-and-commerce website and magazine focused on high-end streetwear. "They want to be in the line." Casting an appraising eye on the restive Thursday morning scene, he drove home the point.

"The line is the new community," Mr Carvalho said. "When 200 to 300 kids are lining up outside of a store, it's because they want to be part of something." Mr Carvalho and Jian DeLeon, Highsnobiety's editorial director, make it their business to monitor the weekly drops at emporiums such as Supreme, Nike Lab and Palace, the London-based skate-fashion store with a new outpost in New York.

On this day, they had offered themselves as field guides to what promised be a highly engaging hybrid of tribal rite and street theatre, a latter-day alternative to the once-ubiquitous bands of adolescents raucously swarming malls. "Come get your number - hurry before they pass you over," a gangly guy in a tank top yelled to a companion. "You only have a certain amount of grace period." For many, the chance to swap insider intelligence and bask in camaraderie was, after all, the point.

Yen for authenticity

"Those things make the kids more agreeable to doing something that on the surface you think is a sort of absurd proposition," said Noah Callahan-Bever, the editor of Complex, an online youth-culture magazine that has chronicled the evolution of the line phenomenon in a series of videos. Absurd, for sure, when a luxury recliner can be reserved at the multiplex on an app such as Fandango, and a puffer coat from Vetements summoned at a click of the mouse.

Yet the line persists, a global trend stretching these days from Tokyo to Tucson, Arizona, and Berlin to the Bronx. Its members, millennials and their younger Gen Z kin, share a mindset, making common cause of a yen for authenticity. What's more, they defy facile stereotyping.

A mere half-dozen years ago, a shared lust for skateboard and locker-room gear sustained the community. "A limited-edition sneaker was so rare that when two people were wearing it, you knew something connected them - certain music, certain art, certain fashion," said David Fischer, Highsnobiety's Berlin-based chief executive. But time, as he noted, wrought changes.

Today, the queue is partly a resellers' market: energetic young entrepreneurs snapping up wares in multiples, then flipping them at soaring mark-ups on eBay or selling them for pocket change to finance their own buys. On this day, the spirit of commerce was lively on Lafayette Street, with vans lining the far side of the block, trunks popped to display limited-edition inventory from Nike, Supreme and other vendors.

"Reselling, it's an easy way to make money," said a tank-top-garbed youth who goes by the street name Young Sin. "I do this every Thursday. You can't get locked up for it." Young Sin, YS to his friends, planned to pick up a cap for himself and offer additional, marked-up items to all comers.

"I like Supreme," he said, shrugging, "but they could be Old Navy as long as it helps pay my rent." For many others, though, the wait itself is sufficient reward. Some could have taken a page from Andy Warhol, who observed in his loosely structured 1975 memoir, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, that lining up for movie tickets offered distinct pleasures. "The possibility of never getting in is exciting," Mr Warhol mused. "But after that, waiting to get in is the most exciting."

Travelling in packs has additional perks. "The death of the shopping centre has created this void in kids' lives," Mr Callahan-Bever said.

"It's being filled in part by this society of kids, some known to each other only through the Internet, all of them into this niche product that acts as a social identifier. For them, standing in line for a T-shirt or baseball cap is a way of telling the world that you know about something that not everyone is hip to." NYTIMES