There has always been a utility to streetwear. Hip Hop generation kids put on what was around them and made it their own. Timberland boots, which served a function on construction sites, were transformed into music video staples because of the ways rappers, and their teams, styled them. Dickies, Carhartt and other brands have a had resurgence in popularity of late due to accessibility, functionality, price point and the ubiquity of these workwear staples turned into highly fashionable, sought after pieces, either new or in the vintage and resale market.
Fashion has traditionally been a culture and art kept away from the masses, due to price and aesthetic. Luxury brands are traditionally too avant-garde and too costly for working class families to afford. But in America, and in hip hop culture especially, we remain aspirational. There are now, three or four generations of street wear designers that have learned from the luxury brands and leaned into the trends and idiosyncrasies of hip hop as a site for style that has influenced the ways the country and world dresses.
First Class Bee is the Creative Director and founder of the brand and store 60647 and Fullerton Avenue Streetwear Market in Logan Square in Chicago. A Mexican American Christian who grew up in an era, where Bee says Mexican-America’s where not necessarily at the pinnacle of cool, Bee often saw himself having a similar or even more progressive sense of style than his peers, in part, due to the influence of his fashionable mother and the music videos he was watching featuring the gear of his favorite emcees. Bee started to rap and dress like he always wanted to and began gaining notoriety for both.
Music was good to him, but fashion was a growing area of interest, both the business and the design aspects. In part, he started his brand and store as a way to give everyone access to what is fly, meaning that part of his mission is to allow everybody, who desires, to have the ability to wear something that is well designed and looks good and is affordable, approachable and represents who they are.
I would classify his approach to design, and the approach of his streetwear pioneers’ predecessors in Chicago like LDRS, Jugnernaut and others, as utilitarian and pluralistic.
Pluralism is the believe that diversity is a benefit to society, and I don’t know if there has been a more popular cultural force, as large as hip hop, that has embraced and practiced such an idea. Streetwear is the physical, representation of the culture and what people wear is an everyday embodiment of that idea.
For Bee, his personal and brand aesthetics and spatial design of his new store at 3234 W. Fullerton Ave., are stark, sleek, and for the most part black and white, and offer easy to wear garments that will put any body of any age or race or ethnic background in comfortable, fashionable, and relatively affordable, and impeccably and thoughtfully designed staples, like t-shirts, hats and hoodies.
But 60647 is also a lifestyle brand that imagines the home as an extension of the self and now has mugs, water bottles and laundry bags for purchase. These objects are all created from the same intention and care for the utilitarian. He makes useful and beautiful objects for the everyday working person to use in their actual lives and not the just the lives and spectacle of Instagram models and Hollywood or musical superstars.
The iconography of 60647 and Fullerton Avenue Streetwear Market also has a deep spiritual significance. On many of the items in the store, a cherub is holding onto a six. For Bee it represents the non-duality and non-judgement he seeks as a Christian and spiritual being and a departure from the rigidity of the church he was raised in.
It is more than the desire to hold good and evil in the same space, but perhaps a sort of acknowledgement that we all live within a spectrum and continuum of what is brutal and beautiful.
As well as the religious and spiritual significance of the design in the 60647 marketplace, is the strong sense of ethnic pride and community that is evident in their biggest selling shirt and the communal nature of the store’s practice. In giant font on the back of a t-shirt, reads “Made by Mexicans in Chicago, IL” and is a collaborative piece by another streetwear and lifestyle brand, Gente Fina that is also sold in store. 60647 gives shelf and rack space to a host of other designers that represent the growing and flourishing culture within Chicago as well as the communal practice of the Bee and his brand.
The streetwear community is often people who often have been left out of conversations about high art, fashion and design but have used utilitarian objects and tools around them to create styles and practices that have helped to reimagine the ways our country talks, listens, dresses and thinks. Bee and his 60647 brand and marketplace give space and shed light and continue to widen the circle of who sits at the center of democracy, making our country more robust, representative and perhaps even that much more fly.
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