Streetwear suicide. The paradox of the subculture that has to kill itself to claim the place of culture

Conspiracy, death, and the suicide of art have fed a dense bibliography that has been provocatively recalled in the title to illustrate the synergies between the path followed by contemporary art and the history of fashion, particularly streetwear. Born from the street, symbol of group identity of youth subcultures divergent from the hegemonic culture, over time streetwear has been transformed from a phenomenon of counter-normative clothing to a fetish of the system. Similarly, history has witnessed the paradox of contemporary art, which has renounced being itself in the traditional sense, for instance by giving up on its esthetic dimension, in order to become something else, conceptual, thereby fulfilling its metaphorical suicide. Like anti-art, so anti-fashion and the passage of streetwear from subculture to culture, but at the cost of a harakiri. The histories of art and streetwear have thus followed the same lines within a chapter full of prolific encounters. They are in fact children of Duchampian- and Warholian-derived irony: the desecrating Balenciaga-Gucci The Hacker Project; the “Magritte-esque” advertising campaigns of the brand with the most surrealistic name of all, Vetements; the Louis Vuitton women’s ready-to-wear Fall/Winter 2019 fashion show in which the hybridizations even invaded the space of the Louvre set up as the Beaubourg. Of all the relationships, one is still controversial: the legitimization of street culture in the last space of art, its temple and mausoleum: the museum.