question I ask myself a lot lately: Where are the subcultures in fashion today?

As far as I can tell, they have been replaced entirely by trends, or more specifically, by populations of individuals who cycle through trends like they scroll Reels or TikToks. Trends are fleeting aesthetic markings. But a subculture is a community, a system of values—the foundation of a unique identity.

I wrote recently in a column that we are post-brand. Some people didn’t like that. I’ve been hearing some version of the phrase “Everyone is a brand now” for years, but it has become apparent that this is no longer the case. People aren’t brands. Brands aren’t even brands anymore. And brands are the backbone of a fashion subculture. A brand has a unique vision, a point of view, and an identity that is related to an aesthetic. But people are now entrepreneurs. They’re founders. Entrepreneurs have a plan for scaling. They see opportunity and develop strategies around seizing it. The brands these founders create have ceased to propose anything like a vision or a point of view. They propose new products and marketing content and little else.

The old notion of a brand has been wholly subsumed by conglomerates, and the idea that we are all brands has gone with it. Brands that were once subcultural beacons are now part of large corporate entities. Supreme, for example, has changed hands between various large private equity and holding companies three times since 2017. But for years, it was the Platonic ideal of a subcultural brand. It had skateboarding as its backbone, a home base in one of New York’s coolest neighborhoods, and a coalition of young people who wore the clothes and espoused the Supreme gospel.

The gods of the fashion subcultures—Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Margaret Howell, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Thom Browne—are still active and as compelling as ever. But the subcultures they helped spawn have faded to some extent, forced to blend in with the global fashion apparatus. Meanwhile, small and independent brands started acting like big corporations. The new model of success is to build something that looks exactly like a decades-old luxury fashion house. Or, for independent designers, to be bought out or hired by one of them outright. Brands aren’t cultivating communities like they used to, because those communities became less valuable than the thing that everyone really wants: clients.

As a result, we have an abundance of very nice clothes without any kind of context. They’re nice clothes that will make you look good, which companies like JCPenney delivered for many years. Which is exactly what I think every time my feed decides to torture me with one of those videos of some coiffed guy with a mustache putting on a little outfit: JCPenney does it better. Because without subcultures fashion suffers. And looking slick is not a subculture.

I do see brands attempting to blur the lines between clients and communities. Miu Miu’s womenswear is a good recent example of consumption resembling a subculture. But is the cult emerging around that brand interested in Mrs. Prada’s deftly crafted archetype? Or is Miu Miu just the hottest brand in the world, with extremely cool campaigns featuring Sydney Sweeney and Emma Corrin?

I haven’t yet mentioned the explosion of the vintage market and the sudden proliferation of very good young vintage dealers. This is a subculture I can get behind, but it depends entirely on the spirit and taste of the individual. Sure, the best vintage shops feel a lot like brands, with a coherent and cohesive approach to buying and merchandising vintage clothes, but, in a way, they are anti-brands. They are curators, which is specifically and intrinsically something very different from a brand.

There is a story from 2006 that I think about all the time, written by Rob Walker called The Brand Underground. Published just as a new wave of fashion and streetwear brands was emerging, the article focuses on three specifically— aNYthing, Barking Irons, and The Hundreds. Walker examines the T-shirt as the perfect vehicle for the brand-as-self-expression machine. He coins the term the Brand Underground to represent what he saw as a new phenomenon in the long, rich history of subcultures: “making statements against the materialistic mainstream—but doing it with different forms of materialism.” The people behind these companies, he writes, “see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.”

The star of the story is aNYthing founder Aaron “Aron” Bonderoff, whom Walker describes as “the postmodern brand rebel, hopscotching the minefield of creativity and commerce, recognizing the categorization, satirizing it, embracing it, and commoditizing it all at once.” Aron, to his credit, describes himself as “the top Cool Guy on the scene.”

The story is a kind of time capsule. Walker quaintly refers to YouTube as “the video-sharing Web site” and certainly gets credit for my first encounter with the term influencer (“what corporate America calls Cool Guys”). And today the Brand Underground exists only in memory. The movement became too big to support its own weight, and the larger fashion world changed. Kanye West took on an outsized influence, for one. Streetwear’s radical provocateurs faded from memory as the stakes rose—the more money there is on the line, the more stable the people in charge need to be. The last generation of independent brand-builders leveraged their influence to infiltrate the establishment—most significantly, Virgil Abloh. His rise to the LVMH-anointed king of global fashion ended the reign of the brand underground.

I’m glad Abloh was the one to do it. He ushered in an exciting and cool new era of luxury fashion and image-making. He agitated for a radical shift in the fashion system, and he totally achieved it.