Spritestyle

Shortly after I wrote a column with the headline “Street Couture,” I got invited to “the Sprite Street Couture Showcase.” This, I was told, would feature brands like Rocawear, LRG, and Triple Five Soul showing new designs, some of which would supposedly include “interpretations” of the new design of Sprite cans. (What I’d written had nothing do with Sprite, or any of those brands; it was about Supreme.) I almost never go to these things, and I didn’t go to this one. But maybe I should have. According to a Village Voice account, Kanye West, Missy Elliot, and the guy who plays A.J. Soprano were all there. (Also on hand was Farnsworth Bentley, who seems to be an official Sprite endorser.) Voice writer Corina Zappia quotes (with appropriate mockery) an official release regarding the event:

Emerging fashion, hip-hop music, and authentic street culture have been part of Sprite’s DNA for nearly two decades. By bringing together five fashion companies with distinct styles for the first Sprite Street Couture Showcase, we are celebrating the brand’s roots in a fresh, contemporary way.

This is a consistent theme with Sprite — how the brand is really tied into hip-hop and so on. What that really seems to mean is that Sprite has positioned itself around hip-hop for a long time. That is: Hip hop has been part of the DNA of Sprite’s marketing strategy for two decades. (And I’ve seen things in the trades indicating that Sprite is actually planning to move away from this strategy, but we’ll see.) I’m certainly not aware of any organic Sprite moment in hip-hop, a soft drink equivalent of the song “My Adidas,” for example. The only reference to Sprite I can think of in rap was that Lil’ Kim song in which she bragged that she could get her mouth around an entire can of Sprite. I’m guessing that the brand didn’t pay for that particular name-check.

It’s not clear if any of the designers actually did interpret the new Sprite can, or whether a promised “influencer after-party” really occurred. But in the end, The Voice says, the event wasn’t bad, and LRG’s stuff looked good, and there wasn’t all that much branding (“until the lights flashed green and the Sprite logo popped up on video screens,” anyway.)

The more interesting question, once you clear away Sprite’s rhetoric, is why LRG and Triple Five Soul would do this. Aren’t they risking their cred by cozying up to a mainstream brand — and basically getting used? The official Sprite answer would of course be: No, because their core audiences are totally down with Sprite! Sprite is part of hip hop and urban culture!

Well, maybe. Here are two other possibilities. One: The streetwear brands figure that their core audiences will understand that Sprite basically paid for them to have a cool fashion show, and this shows admirable hustle on the part of the apparel-makers; it was Sprite, in other words, that got used. Two: The streetwear brands figure that, at the end of the day, their core audience will simply never hear about any of this.