On April 1, women’s footwear brand Larroudé took to Instagram to announce a collaboration with streetwear brand Supreme. While a bit unexpected, it wasn’t a completely surprising move. Supreme reglarly collaborates with all sorts of brands. And 2–year old Larroudé has already collaborated with big-name brands including Oscar de la Renta and Barbie.
The collaboration, however, didn’t really exist. It was an April Fool’s joke on the part of Larroudé, one convincing enough that even Footwear News fell for it. Between posts on the Larroudé Instagram and founder Marina Larroudé’s personal Instagram, the posts received more than 3,000 likes and 300 hundred comments. Commenting on the Instagram post, stylists and fashion industry insiders like Liana Satenstein and Brooks Nader first praised the collaboration, later lamenting that the featured style wouldn’t be released, once the joke was finally revealed. According to Marina Larroudé, the response shows there’s strong demand for more crossover between streetwear and women’s fashion.
“Supreme mostly does sneakers and clothes for men,” Larroudé said, noting that the brand’s long list of collaborators even includes kitchen appliance brands. “It’s never high heels for women and is rarely anything specifically for women, even though the women’s market is huge and there’s an opportunity there.”
She added, “Streetwear could definitely do a better job serving women. [Partnering with a streetwear brand] is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I’ve recently been talking with a few sneaker brands trying to make something happen.”
Streetwear has made some inroads into areas more traditionally feminine in recent years. For example, A Bathing Ape partnered with KNC Beauty on an apparel and beauty collection in July of 2021. At the time, Kristy Noel Crawley, founder of KNC, told Glossy that she hoped to see more streetwear brands either collaborating with women’s brands or releasing their own collections focused on women. Elsewhere in streetwear, Kith teamed with Estée Lauder back in 2019, with Kith founder Ronnie Fieg saying it was time for streetwear to start catering to women.
The interest is clearly there. According to Edited, sneaker reseller GOAT’s women’s audience grew twice as fast as its men’s audience in 2021. And this year, StockX is selling as many women’s shoes every four hours as it did in all of 2016. But the category is still dominated by menswear. The same data from Edited also shows that more than 60% of streetwear retailers’ inventory caters to men.
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For now, Larroudé said the Supreme x Larroudé collab is something she will “manifest.”
“We put it out into the universe,” she said. “It got a great response, and the demand is definitely there. We’ll see where it goes from here.”
