I never thought I would live to see the day where I could say that I vividly understand how Maisie Williams is feeling right now. We live such incredibly different lives: she’s the teenage star of a TV show about dragons, I’m the son of eastern European immigrants that somehow learned English well enough to write about Maisie Williams and for you to read it. Our only common touch point is lives spent in England, although I’ve never been to her home county of Somerset.
Yet now things will never be the same again, as we can both say that we’ve stood at the center of an online shit-storm driven and centered around Supreme. We’ve both read the unkind words of Supreme fanboys and somehow survived. Should the path of our lives ever cross, we will have something to make small talk about, which is convenient, as I haven’t watched a single episode of Game of Thrones.
In case you haven’t got your finger on the pulse of current affairs, Maisie was recently spotted at Antoinette, a Brooklyn thrift store, wearing a (allegedly) knockoff Supreme tee. The store’s owner, Lexi Olivieri, posted an image of her grinning self posing alongside Maisie onto Instagram, which was soon retweeted by snarky streetwear blog, Four Pins, alongside the caption “someone come get anya stark” (a reference to Maisie’s character in GoT). In the picture, we can see Maisie wearing a white tee with a suspiciously oversized box logo, something she was probably handed by her stylist as well as a fashionably half-unbuttoned pair of overalls and a fuzzy bucket hat – a combination that, alongside her googly eyes and rounded nose and cheeks, makes her look like a troll doll impersonating LL Cool J.
Compare the box logo on Maisie’s tee to the original released in 1994 and you’ll see that it’s significantly larger, raising reasonable doubts about its authenticity. Predictably, these doubts have prompted the brand’s devotees to flock to Olivieri’s social media accounts to castigate Maisie’s outfit, which in turn prompted the Brooklyn thrift store owner to issue a saccharine defense of the actress, in which she described her as a “beautiful being” – a term of endearment so sickeningly sweet that it could kill a diabetic. Unsurprisingly, as is usually the case when something like this happens, Maisie’s fuccboi detractors have been called “pathetic” and all sorts of other things for the intensity of their response.
While I’ve ridiculed Supreme’s fan base and the brand that they worship in the past (and received my own fair share of ire for it, just look at the comments) I can actually empathize in this instance. While Rihanna gets a free pass for wearing Thrasher and Drake can style out Stone Island, Maisie looks like she’s on her way to a Halloween party dressed as Jason Dill. Few things are as nauseating as celebs wearing niche brands that they otherwise would have never heard of had their stylist not picked it out for them. It feels so completely fake, something that’s poetically illustrated by the sight of a Supreme tee that looks like it was bought from a Chinese eBay seller. It’s as obtuse as the thought of Daniel Radcliffe speaking ebonics unironically.
Fashion in many ways is about qualification: Versace, for example, is extravagant and repressively expensive. It’s what King Louis XIV would wear if he were alive today. It’s a brand that’s tailor-made for someone like Biggie Smalls, it requires a certain quantity of self-assured swag to pull off. Bill Gates might have all the money in the world but he doesn’t have that intangible X-factor for a brand like Versace to fit him right. He’d look like a toddler stumbling around in his mother’s shoes…or Maisie in Supreme.
And while I’d hate to have to side with someone as insufferable as Lexi Oliviera (“beautiful being”… what newage pop-spiritual bullshit) she does have a point: it’s only a T-shirt. I realize that for its fanboys, Supreme is more than a brand and its products are more than mere objects, but let’s face it guys, Supreme’s image was desecrated long ago. If you take a look at the sort of people that wait for new drops with baited breath, furiously refreshing the brand’s webstore on drop day, most of them are suburban teenagers who can only be differentiated from Trekkies or LARPing nerds by the clothes that they wear. That geekish collectors element and autistic obsessiveness is fundamentally the same. Supreme might be quite cool, but, realistically, most of the people wearing it aren’t any cooler than Maisie.
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those solely of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of Highsnobiety as a whole.