Brands
Top 10 Streetwear Brands
The word streetwear now stretches from a $37 hooded sweatshirt to a $535 one with a shark's face on the hood. The ten names that keep coming up sit all along that range.
They are also less separate than they look, and the common address is Stüssy. James Jebbia helped open its first New York store in 1991, then founded Supreme three years later. Tremaine Emory, the designer who runs Denim Tears, worked there before Supreme made him its first creative director in 2022; he resigned the following year alleging systemic racism at the company. Fergus Purcell, the graphic designer behind Palace's triangle, drew for Stüssy first. Five of the ten are still run by the person who started them.
Supreme
New York skate. Graphic-led, collaboration-driven, built around one hoodie.
James Jebbia opened a skate shop on Lafayette Street in 1994. He had spent the previous three years helping Stüssy into New York. The box logo, the Thursday drop, the queue, the resale market: all of it came out of that room. VF Corporation bought the company in 2020. In 2024 it sold Supreme to EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear group behind Ray-Ban and Oakley, for $1.5 billion in cash. The filings put Supreme's annual revenue at $538 million, inside a group with two hundred thousand employees.
The box logo hoodie is the whole proposition. Seasonal variation runs to where the second embroidery lands. The hood in 2024. The sleeve in 2025. The garment is engineered to keep its length.
Supreme publishes no weight, no fibre percentage, no care instruction, no country. It publishes the construction instead. That is worth more than the numbers the others print.
Fleece knitted one way, then cut ninety degrees across it, moves sideways instead of upwards. That is what crossgrain means. A hoodie built that way loses width before it loses length. Length is what makes an old sweatshirt still wearable. The rib gussets are the ribbed panels down the sides, absorbing the movement the turn creates. The idea comes from the years when a sweatshirt was equipment.
Lift your arm, look down the side seam. A ribbed panel running to the hem is the tell.
Fall/Winter 2021. Heavyweight cotton crossgrain fleece with rib gussets and pouch pocket. $168.
Fall/Winter 2023. Heavyweight crossgrain brushed-back fleece with rib gussets and pouch pocket. $168.
Fall/Winter 2024. Heavyweight crossgrain brushed-back fleece with rib gussets and pouch pocket. $168.
Fall/Winter 2025. Heavyweight crossgrain brushed-back fleece with rib gussets and pouch pocket. $168.
The price has not moved since 2021. Three seasons at $168. The description is the only fibre information Supreme gives. Across those seasons it changed. Fall/Winter 2021 said heavyweight cotton crossgrain fleece. Fall/Winter 2023, 2024 and 2025 say heavyweight crossgrain brushed-back fleece, with no fibre named at all.
Stüssy
California surf, grown into the plain street basic. Embroidered, dyed, never loud.
Shawn Stussy shaped surfboards in Laguna Beach. He signed them with a marker, a signature he took from his uncle Jan. The signature went onto t-shirts and caps. A friend named Frank Sinatra put in $5,000 in 1984. By 1990 the business turned over $17 million a year. Jebbia opened the New York store in 1991. Shawn sold his shares in the mid-nineties. The Sinatra family has owned it ever since. His name is still on every garment.
Cuts run relaxed. The decoration is stitched, not printed: 246 products carry embroidery, 212 carry patches. The palette is surf and workwear: black, navy, bone, olive, khaki, ash heather. Pigment dye and washing do the rest. Median price across the range is $120.
The Lightweight Terry Zip Hoodie is listed at 10.8oz pigment-dyed cotton terry, 100% cotton, imported, $140. Ounces, not grams per square metre. Stüssy is the only brand in the ten to measure fleece that way. Noah does it too.
No brand here prints both units. An ounce figure means one thing per square yard, another per linear yard. Inside the Stüssy range 10.8oz sits at the light end. The page calls it lightweight. Word and figure agree.
Every page names a country. The country is Imported, which satisfies US labelling rules and points nowhere. Noah's pages say Canada. A filled field and a specific one are not the same thing.
Pigment dye goes onto the finished garment instead of the yarn. The zip is YKK metal. The drawcord is woven, not printed.
BAPE
Harajuku maximalism. Camo, characters, and the only real colour in the category.
Nigo built A Bathing Ape in Tokyo out of Ura-Harajuku. For a decade the camo, the shark hood and the deliberately tiny production runs defined what Japanese streetwear meant abroad. He sold it in 2011 to I.T, a Hong Kong retail group, then went on to Human Made and Kenzo. Half its fleece variants are out of stock at any moment.
Camo is in 181 of 500 product names. Green runs to 388 colourways, pink to 206, yellow to 161, red to 154, where every other brand here stays in black and grey. Fits are relaxed. The shark hood and the BAPE STA carry the rest. You are paying for recognition, not construction. Median price across the range is $200.
The Shark Full Zip Hoodie is listed as 100% cotton at $535. A third of the fleece names its fibre. The pieces people queue for fall inside that third: the Color Stone zip at $489 and the 1st Camo rhinestone full-zip at $595 both say 100% cotton. The women's Shark Hoodie Bomber says 100% polyester at $679.
The rest carry a line about the graphic, or a product code. Weight, care, country never appear. The label sewn into the seam is the only place those answers exist.
Three things have to be on a garment label sold in the United States. Fibre content. Country of origin. The identity of the business responsible for it, given either as a full legal name and address or as a Registered Identification Number from the Federal Trade Commission. RNs are optional, a company can print its name instead, but where one appears the FTC database resolves it in seconds, free. A brand name on its own does not satisfy the rule, so the name on the tag is a legal entity rather than a marketing one.
Carhartt WIP
American workwear, re-cut in Europe. Duck canvas, heavy cotton, job-site specs.
Carhartt WIP is not Carhartt. Hamilton Carhartt started the American company in Detroit in 1889, two sewing machines, five workers. His descendants still own it out of Dearborn, Michigan. In 1989 a Swiss couple, Edwin and Salomée Faeh, came to the United States to ask about representing the brand in Europe. By 1994 they had a licence to design their own clothing under the name Carhartt Work In Progress. The Detroit jacket in a Berlin shop comes from a different company than the one on a Michigan job site.
Workwear with the proportions adjusted: Detroit jackets in duck canvas, double-knee trousers, heavy hooded sweats. It gives you more specification for less money than any other name here.
The Hooded Chase Sweatshirt is listed at 58/42% cotton/polyester, 440 g/sqm, €89, and the figure sits in the page’s own product data rather than in the marketing copy. Every colourway carries the same number. A figure appearing once might be copywriting. A figure on all of them is something a company has decided to defend.
Brushed poly-cotton, regular fit, raglan sleeves, flatlock seams. Flatlock butts two edges together instead of folding one over the other, so the seam finishes level with the cloth. Turn the garment inside out and look at the shoulder.
30°C delicate, hang dry, no tumble drying, iron below 110°C. The 42% polyester is what holds a fabric this heavy in shape. Weight, fibre and care on one page, at €89. Only Aimé Leon Dore does more.
Supermade
Distressed graphic streetwear. Oversized, washed, rhinestoned, loud on purpose.
A US direct-to-consumer line on a Chinese supply chain, 1,807 products across the store, of which 496 are graphic tees and 165 are jeans.
Cuts run oversized and relaxed almost throughout. The finish is the product: 901 pieces distressed, 589 vintage, 530 washed, 161 set with rhinestones.
Hoodies run $37 to $147, median $64 across the store. Where the fibre is named the page is specific: the Full Print Tactical Gun Zip Up Hoodie at $80.20 is 100% cotton fleece. That covers thirteen of 178 fleece products. Washing instructions appear on a hundred and seven. Weight and country appear on none, the same as BAPE.
Only 9% of the range is out of stock, matched here only by Heron Preston.
Nothing gets cut until a fabric weight in grams per square metre, a fibre split and a country of manufacture are fixed, so those numbers exist on the tech pack already. They are being moved onto the product pages.
Palace
London skate. Decks first, graphics second, everything else after that.
Palace was started by two skaters, Lev Tanju and Gareth Skewis, who both worked the counter at Slam City Skates in Covent Garden. Tanju spent the decade after college skating around Southbank. His crew called their derelict South London flat the palace. In 2009 the joke became a company. Fergus Purcell, then design director at Marc Jacobs, earlier a designer for Stüssy, drew them a Penrose triangle with the name on each side. The Tri-Ferg has been on everything since.
It is still a skateboard company. It still sells decks.
Palace sells on the graphic and the drop. The page is built for precisely that. The South2 West8 Hood at £198 carries a name, a price, images, and a description reading in full: five pints plus eight fish tacos equals bed.
Everything else the brand puts out sits somewhere else. Release calendars, lookbooks, skate videos better than most of what this category makes. None of it lives on the page you buy from.
The specification is there, folded away under a link marked Technical Details. Open it and the same hood reads 400GSM brushback sweat, 74% cotton, 26% polyester. Weight and fibre, both stated, on a page that gives no hint of it until you click. Washing instructions and country of origin are not given.
Aimé Leon Dore
New York prep. Heritage sportswear, cut regular, in paint-chart colours.
Teddy Santis started ALD in Queens in 2014. No fashion school. He wanted to call it Aimé. The word proved too broad to trademark, so he added his father's nickname, Leon, then Dore from his own name, Theodore. He still runs it.
The clothes are the preppy end of streetwear. Ralph Lauren filtered through a Greek-American childhood in New York. It is the only brand here whose default cut is regular fit, 173 products against 88 relaxed, while everyone else is widening. Nylon runs through 188 pieces. The colour names read like a paint chart: Coconut Milk, Pine Grove, Navy Blazer, Kalamata. Alone among the ten it publishes the measurements of the garment. Median price across the range is $225, the highest of the ten.
Every page carries a washing instruction and a country of origin. Fibre content is on nearly all of them, a fabric weight on most. No other brand in the ten answers all four.
A weight figure describes a square metre of cloth. It says nothing about how much cloth ended up in the hoodie: a boxy dropped-shoulder cut swallows considerably more than a fitted one at the same weight. Oversized is an intention. A body length and a chest width are an object.
The range also admits when something is not cotton. That New Balance warmup hoodie at $295 is listed as a diamond jacquard nylon blend.
Fear of God
Greyscale minimalism on sportswear proportions. Relaxed, dropped, drapey, no colour.
Fear of God is the work of Jerry Lorenzo, a Los Angeles designer who had no fashion training and came to it from sports marketing, and it owes nothing to skate culture. The diffusion line, Essentials, put the look into far more wardrobes than the main collection ever could.
Relaxed, dropped shoulder, boxy, in that order and in volume. There is no colour in the range at all. The nine most-used names are Black, Seal, Vintage Black, Seal Heather, Iron Grey, Concrete Heather, Ivory, Moss and Overcast. Knits and fleece are most of it, 288 and 195 products, much of it pigment dyed or faded on purpose. Weights appear on 53 of its 92 fleece products. They run heavy. Median price across the range is $140.
The Forty Niners Sport Crewneck is listed as heavy 480gsm core fleece at $160. Puff print is named as puff print. The fit is called relaxed sport.
Fibre content shows up on twenty of the ninety-two. Four pages give a country. So the 480 grams could be cotton or a cotton-polyester blend. Those are different garments after two winters.
Corteiz
London military-utility. Baggy, terrace-cut, ripstop and applied graphics.
Clint Ogbenna signs everything Clint419. He built Corteiz in London on the opposite of a retail strategy. Locked Instagram account. No wholesale. Drops announced by coordinates. The clothes are military and utilitarian, the Alcatraz logo is on most of them, the scarcity is real.
Baggy and boxy, cut close to the football terrace rather than the skate park, with ripstop and nylon for the outerwear. The graphics are applied heavily: 250 products embroidered, 95 screen printed, 54 in puff. All cotton at a stated weight, hardware named, some styles pre-shrunk. Jersey is the biggest category, Island the largest line. Median price is £115.
The Superior Royale Zip Hoodie is listed as 440GSM 100% cotton fleece at £120. The number comes before the graphic in the description.
Carhartt WIP · 440 g/sqm. 58% cotton, 42% polyester. Brushed, regular fit, raglan sleeves, flatlock stitching. 30°C delicate, no tumble dry. Hooded Chase Sweatshirt, €89.
Corteiz · 440GSM. 100% cotton fleece. Boxy relaxed fit, coverstitch detailing, YKK two-way zip. Care and country not stated. Superior Royale Zip Hoodie, £120.
Most of the fleece lands on the same figure, 440GSM, all cotton. That is exactly the number on the Carhartt WIP hoodie. The two are not the same cloth. One of them is 42% polyester. A weight is worth whatever the fibre beside it makes it worth.
The HMP V2 Sweatshirt is 440GSM pre-shrunk, meaning the fabric was relaxed before cutting, so the shrinking happened at the mill instead of in your machine. The HMP Thermal Zip Hoodie carries two figures, a 440GSM shell over a 330GSM cotton lining. The HMP Contrast Hoodie at £120 lists its panelling, rope drawstrings, fleece lining, YKK two-way zips and coverstitch.
Washing instructions and country of origin are not stated. About a third of the range is out of stock at any moment.
Kith
No house style. A shop that sells access, cut every way at once.
Ronnie Fieg launched Kith in 2011 as a footwear shop. It is now closer to a department store.
Footwear. 649 low top sneakers, 122 boots. 271 products carry Nike in the name.
Tops. 325 short sleeve tees, 122 tank tops, 119 jackets, 113 button-up shirts, 91 hoodies.
Everything else. 188 eyewear, 126 pants, 109 shorts, 95 jeans, 81 bracelets, and the rest of 4,000.
The catalogue is mostly other people's shoes: of 4,000 products, 649 are low-top sneakers and 258 carry Nike in the name. Relaxed, dropped shoulder, cropped, fitted, oversized, wide and slim each appear more than ninety times. A shop cuts whatever it stocks. Embroidery or a patch sits on around 1,500 products. Median price across the range is $185.
Nearly every piece of fleece here names its fibre. Weight appears on eleven products out of 145, all in the BMW capsule. The BMW crewneck is $165, the hoodie $175. Both spell out the drawcord hood, the dropped shoulders, the kangaroo pocket. Same team, same house, full specification when a collaboration calls for it. The house fleece gets none of that.
Across the full catalogue, 88% of fleece variants are sold out.
Nearly Made It
Denim Tears. Tremaine Emory founded it in 2019 around one image. A cotton wreath, printed on denim, pointing at slavery and the American cotton economy. Everything the brand makes descends from it. Emory had worked at Stüssy, then with Virgil Abloh and Kanye West. He took the creative director job at Supreme in 2022 and resigned the following year, alleging systemic racism there. Origin is answered on every single page. Unlike Stüssy's Imported, these name places. Fibre content is on all but one. A brand built on where American cotton came from and who picked it would look strange ducking the origin question. Fabric weight is not stated anywhere in the range. Only 18% of the range is out of stock.
Noah. A weight on thirty-nine of forty-one fleece products, a fibre on forty, a country on all forty-one. The country is Canada. Brendon Babenzien founded it after a long run designing at Supreme. The Arch Appliqué Zip-Up Hoodie is 100% cotton, 12 oz combed brushed-back fleece, made in Canada, at $118. The Flannel Hood Sweatshirt is $83. Only Heron Preston documents a garment more fully, at three times the price. Runs are small and 88% of Noah's fleece is gone at any moment.
Heron Preston. All four questions answered on every fleece product it lists, the only clean sweep of the sixteen brands counted. A zip hoodie is $365, a crewneck $395. Only 9% is out of stock.
Patta. Weight on five of sixteen. The Floral Patchwork Hooded Sweater is 450gsm 100% cotton at €138, heavier than most of what the ten publish.
A-COLD-WALL*, Brain Dead, Nude Project. All three sell on design. The pages describe the graphic, not the cloth.
The Short Version
Price predicts none of it. The two best-documented garments cost $118 and $365. The one that says least about itself costs $535. Corteiz prints 440GSM in the first line of the description; Palace prints the same class of figure behind a link most buyers never open.
None of it is proof either. A published number is a claim, not a measurement. The only way to settle it is to weigh the thing. It invites you to check, which a company has to decide to do on purpose.
A kitchen scale costs less than the cheapest hoodie here.
Common Questions
It means more cloth per square metre, nothing else. The same 440 figure appears on a Carhartt WIP hoodie that is 42% polyester and a Corteiz one that is all cotton. Read the fibre beside the number or the number tells you very little.
Stüssy and Noah do, the rest use grams per square metre. No brand here publishes both, and an ounce figure means one thing per square yard and another per linear yard, so the two scales cannot be lined up from the pages alone.
That the garment was made outside the country of sale, and nothing more. It satisfies US labelling requirements without naming anywhere. Noah's pages say Canada instead, which is the same field carrying actual information.
Lift the arm and look down the side seam for a ribbed panel running to the hem, which marks crossgrain construction. Turn it inside out and check whether the shoulder seam sits flat or stands proud. Then read the label for fibre, country and the company responsible.
On documentation for the money, Noah at $118 and Carhartt WIP at €89. Both tell you what the cloth is before you pay for it, which most of this list does not.
Method
Nine of the ten come from six current published rankings of streetwear brands, counting how many name each label. Supreme appears on all six. Stüssy, BAPE, Carhartt WIP, Palace and Aimé Leon Dore on five. Fear of God and Corteiz on four, Kith on three. The tenth entry is Supermade, which publishes this list, appears on none of the six and is placed among them rather than ranked by them. Denim Tears, on two, is the label it displaced. Where brands tie on that count they are placed oldest first, using founding dates as commonly reported; those dates are not all firmly documented and the tie order is the softest thing here. Six rankings is a small sample. A larger one would move the middle of the list.
Fleece counts were compiled from each brand's own live product listings in 2026: every product whose title contains hoodie, hooded, sweatshirt or crewneck, excluding trousers, tracksuits, tees and accessories. Out-of-stock figures are the share of listed variants marked unavailable on the date of collection. Prices are as each brand lists them in its own currency, unconverted.
Carhartt WIP, Supreme and Palace publish no machine-readable catalogue, so those three were read page by page and are not counts across a range. Palace states weight and fibre inside a collapsed Technical Details panel rather than in the visible description. Supreme's webstore was closed between seasons at the time of collection, so its entry rests on the archived seasonal descriptions and on the retail price, not on a live product page.
Fabric weights and countries of origin are as stated by the brand on its own page. They are not presented as independent measurements, nor as readings from a garment label. Figures published in different units are not placed on the same scale. Corporate transaction figures are from the acquiring company's own filings and announcements.
The brands and the drop model behind all this sit in our guide to streetwear.