Is Jean-Michael Basquiat the Original Father of Streetwear?

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Is fashion art? The age old question that continues to generate heated debates from fashion and art lovers alike. No matter which side of the argument you’re on, it’s no question the two creative spheres have organically intertwined themselves, whether it be Yayoi Kusama’s cherry red bob and “infinity net” clothing or Salvador Dali’s surrealist handlebar mustache, it’s almost impossible for artists to separate themselves and their fashions from their creations defining themselves as a living, breathing canvas’. Yet in this current era of innate self-expression and the streetwear-obsessed, perhaps no artist has held a fixation on fashion quiet like neo-expressionist graffiti street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Unlike the graffiti art now seen in highfalutin art galleries, the street art movement that Basquiat pioneered began as a low barrier-of-entry for artists during the ’80s in New York City for the underrepresented, underground creatives in the city’s burgeoning art circles. While street art was once considered vandalism, the miraculous fusion of art, youth culture, pop, and fashion quickly grew into the respected artistic style that it is today, much like streetwear in fashion and how it has grown from the bottom up.

In Basquiat’s ten short years on the art scene, he embodied the inclusive, creative spirits of New York City, where he reigned with his notorious trademark expression– his signature scribbles, scrawls, and careless strokes resulting in cartoonish symbols of crowns, dinosaurs, and skull imagery. Raw and enigmatic, Basquiat’s expressive nature of painting was constituted through a fusion of texts, images, and collages drawn with childlike haste. Yet underneath his poetic scribblings lies a profound examination of societal dichotomies: wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. Basquiat worked too marry activism with images, melding figurative art with historical contexts to convey social critiques on class struggles, systemic racism, and colonialism.

A notoriously shy personality, Basquiat used his art to communicate for him, but also his use of fashion in elevating a sense of performance art. Those close to Basquiat remember him as a lover of fashion who’d oft rack up a large bill at local clothing boutiques. The artist who once walked in Comme des Garçon’s Spring/Summer 1987 show embodied a sense of upscale casualness that differed from his chaotic art; he loved Armani suits, Issey Miyake coats, and chic dark Wayfarer sunglasses. For Basquiat, fashion was a mechanism of defense in gaining the respect of the white washed art world as a Black man. According to legend, store clerks once followed him around in department stores and was barred from entering an exclusive boutique, these were the daily prejudices Basquiat was confronted with that he attempted to combat with fashion.

After a dramatic rise to fame becoming the art world’s prodigy, his dazzling career ceased with his death at the young age of 27. This astonishing ending elevated his stardom to that of a godfather of street art, and the values of his paintings to a whopping eight-digits (sometimes nine-digits) figure. The effects of Basquiat’s fleeting genius on the art world was expected, however his unforeseen impact on the fashion world continues to provide inspiration to this day.

Basquiat’s estate has long been partnered with licensing and marketing agency Artestar who has ensured that Basquiat’s signature imagery, graffiti heads, archetypal symbols would live on for decades to come, making Basquiat a formidable and beloved collaborator with fashion labels of all price points, especially since the culture of collaborative work in fashion took off with the rise of streetwear.

In 2018, Virgil Abloh of Off-White paid tribute to the creative genius with a capsule collection that repurposed the NYC painter’s remarkable oeuvres into designs and graphics emblazoned across sweatshirts, t-shirts, hoodies, trousers, and accessories. It was an adventurous collab in which Basquiat’s aggressive brushstrokes boldly contrast with Off-White’s monochrome pieces. Little modification was done to undermine Basquiat’s jagged graphics, and the label’s signature quotation marks were reformatted to accompany his trademark writing, squiggly detailing, and emblematic scripture.

Many designers have reverently embraced Basquiat’s works, by imprinting them across their collection pieces. In 2009, Reebok had already teamed up with the estate of Basquiat to produce a sneaker capsule featuring gear meshed with Basquiat’s emotional imagery like his signature scribbles, Reebok’s classic icons and matter-of-fact streetwear ethos. The collab exemplifies how two discrete yet congenial subcultures, sneaker culture and street art, come together under Basquiat’s influence, denoting the beginning of a new, lasting trend. Earlier this year, Dr. Martens gave two of the artist’s iconic paintings a new canvas with its new combat boot release where Basquiat’s motifs with graffiti-like imagery of bones, crowns, and all-caps texts are immortalized on the body of the shoes.

Founder Valentino Garavani collaborated with Artestar for Valentino’s Fall/Winter 2006 collection translating Basquiat’s irreverence and enigma into elaborate beadwork and embroidery on luxe clothings. The collection itself was an ode to how Basquiat’s legacy would continue to influence luxury fashion for the next several years to come. Famed streetwear brand Supreme teamed up with the Basquiat estate for its Fall/Winter 2013 collection that consists of shirts and hoodies baring iterations of the late artist’s abstract icons. Most recently, Coach launched its Basquiat installment as a tribute to the legend as an NYC-native luxury brand. The capsule reframes Basquiat’s seminal sketches in a playful, modern context, aiming to introduce the renegade’s visuals to a new generation while drawing details from the nostalgia of a late ’70s and ’80s New York.

Perhaps this is how Basquiat, even after death, could still live to paint his marks on fashion. Whether it’s Off-White’s harmonization with Basquiat’s edginess across the wardrobe staples or Coach’s retro capsule tailored by Basquiat’s downtown presence, contemporary fashion has reinterpreted the artist’s raw art form to represent his soar from an underground creative to one of the art world’s greats. The graffiti art movement that Basquiat helped galvanize has since aligned itself with the streetwear movement in fashion both stemming from a young, aspirational band of creatives in urban culture. The adaptation of Basquiat’s work for elite fashion brands represents him as a leader for the subcultures underrepresented by luxury fashion who are slowly becoming today’s tastemakers.

Unsurprisingly, contemporary streetwear labels have succeeded in capitalizing on Basquiat’s urban appeal in the most literal way possible, by appropriating his casual life-as-art approach to existence and reviving a cultural savviness synonymous with his paintings. Through clever branding, street fashion labels are using Basquiat to make a statement on dualities: much like Basquiat’s take on social dichotomies, street art or graffiti-inspired fashion is a subculture with a rebellious genesis. Hence, it protests against the industry’s mainstream conventionalism on styles and aesthetics. As designers of all price points embrace underground conceptuality, as runways are transformed into visual art performances, and as retail advertisements and displays are increasingly becoming attune to what street art represents, the divide between art and fashion is only growing smaller the way Basquiat would have intended it to be.

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