We take a look at the surfer brand’s new Made In California capsule collection, exclusive to MR PORTER.

It feels quite fitting that, if you head to the Wikipedia page for Stüssy looking for the year it was founded, the best that the site’s legion of fact obsessives can come up with is “the early 1980s”. Fitting because the brand, originally founded by Mr Shawn Stussy, has always had that air of the languorous, surf-slacker shoulder shrug to it, even as it transcended its Orange County roots and became perhaps the most recognisable “streetwear” brand in the world. The inverted commas there are necessary, because Mr Stussy himself always struck a somewhat bemused (or possibly weary) tone when it came to classifying his brand. “Everybody calls it surfwear, or urban streetwear, or surf street,” he told The New York Times in 1992. “I don’t name it and I don’t name it on purpose.”

Perhaps it’s that very rejection of prescriptive labelling that has allowed Stüssy to traverse the amorphous world of streetwear so successfully over the past handful of decades. Whether fashioning a global community of likeminded creatives (the Stüssy Tribe) or collaborating with some of the most iconic brands around (more on that later), Stüssy has always managed to stay true to its core. As we celebrate the launch of an exclusive Stüssy x MR PORTER capsule collection, created as part of our Made In California project, we take a look at some key features of the collaboration, and how they fit into the overarching world of the surf-shack that Shawn built.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ve probably noticed the explosion of Hawaiian shirts across the menswear world. Whether it’s Wacko Maria’s Japanese take on rockabilly by way of True Romance sleaze, or the sun-dazed grunge glamour of Saint Laurent, plenty of designers are finding strands of their brand DNA that are compatible with this particular summer trend.

With its roots in the Gen X surf culture of Orange County, California, however, there are few brands that can lay lay claim to the aesthetic in the way that Stüssy does. In fact, former pro-skater, DJ and Hawaii resident Mr Jules Gayton was an OG member of the Stüssy Tribe, trading hip-hop and reggae mixtapes with Mr Stussy in exchange for free clothes (he is also the owner of Stüssy’s Honolulu store, which he opened in 2007). The shirts in the MR PORTER capsule collection feature an exploded print of the classic Polynesian floral motif, all rendered in the soft rayon fabric that has become synonymous with the style.

The Stüssy x MR PORTER collection is merely the latest addition to the brand’s highly sought-after collaborative projects. As pre-internet pioneers of the endeavour, the tribe understood the value in bringing talent together, rather than working in pure opposition. Their collaborations with Nike around the turn of the millennium, in particular, helped cement this. In 2000, Mr Michael Kopelman of Stüssy UK (and unquestionably the most influential figure in London’s wider streetwear scene) teamed up with Nike’s Mr Fraser Cooke to make the Stüssy x Nike Air Huarache LE. The following year, between 3,000 and 5,000 pairs of Stüssy x Nike Dunk Highs went on sale at Stüssy stores around the world and sold out in just two days (again, it must be stressed, before the dawn of online hype and mass e-commerce).

What’s the first thing you think of when you think of Stüssy? Few, one suspects, would leap to anything other than Mr Stussy’s iconic signature logo (and by extension the font that can be seen across everything from the original Stüssy Tribe varsity jackets to this season’s exclusive MR PORTER tees). What’s less well-known, however, is the fact that it isn’t really Mr Stussy’s signature at all. It’s an approximation of the handwriting of Mr Jan Stussy, Mr Stussy’s uncle and a renowned artist in his own right. Mr Jan Stussy’s creative impulses led to him use a whole host of different media to express himself, from poetry to film (he won an Oscar for Gravity Is My Enemy in 1978). It suggests his influence is present in Stüssy the brand beyond a signature. One only has to look at the liberated, collage-like approach to design at the heart of every collection Mr Shawn Stussy and his successors have put out.

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