According to The Cut, Tremaine Emory, designer and founder of premium denim brand Denim Tears and co-founder of the creative collective, No Vacancy Inn, alongside DJ Acycle, was appointed Supreme’s Creative Director in February 2022, when VF Corp made a bid for the brand of just over $2 billion. VF Corp is an American conglomerate that owns the Vans brand, The North Face brand, Timberland brand, and Dickies brand.
Just over a year and a half after Emory was appointed, he stepped down as the brand’s Creative Director citing systemic racism as the reason for his resignation.
Before developing an aortic aneurysm that prevented him from working in October of 2022, he claimed to have started working with Arthur Jafa on some images that would depict the Black experience on clothing. Since Supreme has often employed controversial imagery to bolster its radical image and the company even released a Prodigy T-shirt with a Black guy in jail with the words HNIC (Head Niggar in Charge), Emory went all out.
Emory collaborated with Jafa to make unflinching images. The three photographs chosen are the “lynching of a black person”, the “scars” from the “flogging” of a former slave, and an “image” of a Black man whose skin had been bleached from the waist down except the “private parts.”
Following his recovery in April, Emory reports that he learned that the three Jafa photos had been removed from circulation four months after he resumed work. This was what led to his resignation.
In one of his Instagram posts, as reported by Vogue Business, he said, “My issue isn’t whether it got cancelled or not, it’s that I wasn’t contacted about it for four months. That’s my problem. I oversee creative direction. And they were chatting about it behind my back in the C-suite, which I am a part of.” That’s systemic racism.
In a response to the Business of Fashion, Supreme refuted all of Emory’s assertions, saying it disagreed with his “characterization of our company and the handling of the Arthur Jafa project,” which it says hasn’t been cancelled but has not just been released yet.
In response, Emory called the statement “a lie to hide the systemic racism that lies deep within Supreme and almost all white-owned corporations” in an Instagram post.
In the resignation letter obtained from the Business of Fashion, he also stated that the main reasons behind his decision to quit were the senior management’s “inability to communicate” regarding the rumored cancellation of a project involving Black artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa and the lack of transparency surrounding the alleged move. In the letter, Emory stated, “This has caused me a great deal of distress as well as the belief that systematic racism was at play within the structure of Supreme.”
Tremaine Emory, not one to let that deter him, is currently collaborating with Arthur Jafa on a new project under his label, Denim Tears. Emory announced on Instagram on April 22, 2024, that he was working with a visual artist on a collaboration that will be released on April 26 through Denim Tears.
He did provide some of the products, even if details about the partnership are now limited. Tré, the owner of Neighbors Skate Shop, gives the finger as he displays a baby blue zip-up sweatshirt with an all-over graphic that says, “Systemic Racism Controls America.” This design mimics the 2007 Supreme sweatshirt bearing the slogan “Illegal Business Controls America.”
In addition to the zip-up, Tré is wearing a graphic T-shirt with Jafa’s 2017-piece LeRage over the chest, an artwork intended to make statements on “gender, Blackness, and cultural perception.” An image of The Incredible Hulk in black is shown hitting the ground. Jafa’s early love of comic books served as the inspiration for LeRage, according to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
On Friday, April 26th, Denim Tears x Arthur Jafa’s “Systemic Racism Controls America” will be available on denimtears.com and in-store at African Diaspora Goods in New York City as reported by Modern Notoriety.