It's 9AM on a Thursday and 300 young men are lined up along a street in Soho. The guy at the front of the queue, 18-year-old Nick from Wembley, lets out a sort of pissed off yawn when I approach him. He's been waiting here 23 hours, he says, trying to sleep on one of the camping chairs now piled up across the road. The guy at the back of the queue, 17-year-old Werner, flew into London this morning from his home in Finland, just to stand in this line for the rest of the day.
In about an hour the doors to Supreme's London store will be opened, and everyone here – tired Nick; patient Werner; teenagers from Cardiff, Newcastle and Canterbury; the guy wearing a Supreme sleeping bag like a slanket – will get their chance to walk inside, past the sculpture of a smiley white ghost, and flick through the first batch of caps, coats, hoodies and T-shirts released this season.
The majority of queuers are heading straight for the shirt featuring a photo of gloomy vegetarian Morrissey. The photo he didn't want Supreme to use, he said, because they once collaborated with a burger chain – and also just because he didn't like the face he was pulling. Werner knows he isn't getting the Morrissey shirt; it'll have sold out long before he makes it inside, along with all the other stuff he actually wants. But that's fine. He's happy to pay for a flight and a hotel – and then queue for six hours – in the hope he'll find anything in his size, even if it's just a pair of boxer shorts.
This is completely normal. Every time Supreme releases chunks of new stuff at its ten stores across Europe, America and Japan – which is every Thursday from the start of each collection – hundreds of people skip school or work to get first dibs. A couple of weeks after my visit, the London shop manager tells Supreme's British disciples that if they're planning a pilgrimage they'll need to start queuing on the Thursday morning – instead of the Wednesday night – because the weekly influx of rough sleepers in £300 trainers is rankling the local council.
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