Supreme officially brought the 2023 spring joint series in cooperation with Bernadette Corporation this week. Bernadette Corporation, an art group from New York, is led by Bernadette Van-Huy, John Kelsey and Jim Fletcher. In the summer of 1994, Van-Huy was invited to host a night at Club USA, for which she assembled a group of friends and collaborators to come on set. Although the gathering itself was short-lived, the group survives to this day and gradually expanded into fields as diverse as fashion, magazine publishing, film, writing and fine art.
From the beginning, Bernadette Corporation sought to fuse and subvert the commercial aesthetics and strategies that emerged in the art and fashion spaces of the mid-90s. Members simply called the company both a joke and a critical position. “It’s an anti-art stance to accept this kind of crude commercialism,” Van-Huy once said. “Doing something in a gallery that seems so elegant and serious is also unique. But we just prefer to use common language and a more stupid form.”
Between 1995 and 1997, Bernadette Corporation developed a fashion label. Conceptually, the line is a tool to stimulate the industry from within. Recognizing the appropriation of subcultures by the fashion system, Bernadette Corporation responded with a language that made those class and race codes explicit. They’d scour the Yellow Pages for models and put Chinatown knockoffs down the runway. Ironically, Bernadette Corporation began to be embraced by the industry it satirized, and its work began to appear in magazines such as iD, New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and Purple. This ongoing dialogue with the magazine led Bernadette Corporation to produce their own Made in USA between 1999 and 2001.
Anti-globalization protests during the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, and soon after 9/11, prompted Bernadette Corporation to move outward from fashion and publishing. They made an experimental documentary, 2003’s Get Rid of Yourself, which combined footage of the G8 riots with performances by Chloe Sevigny, Werner von Delmont and members of the anarchist group Black Bloc. Taken together, Bernadette Corporation’s work, in all its different forms, is deeply social.
In this cooperation series, the two parties brought sports jackets, short-sleeved work shirts, raglan sleeve tops, football uniforms, sports pants, Chino trousers, cargo shorts, T-Shirt, 6-Panel hats, clips, towels, And Spalding basketball and other items. The series will be launched in Supreme North America and Europe on May 18th, and will be available in Japan on May 20th.
