A cardboard box covered in Chinese customs labels sits in the attic of Jack Lee’s family’s home in Roscoe Village. The teenager slices into the box and pulls out a pair of black basketball shorts adorned with white lightning bolts. He smiles as he traces the mesh material with his fingers.
Lee, a DePaul College Prep student, is the founder of the streetwear brand Snker Method. He’s also among high school students in Chicago area who have started their own clothing companies, selling everything from hoodies to ski masks, operating out of their homes, selling mostly to fellow students but also shipping clothes around the country.
Lee’s aim? To sell $1 million of merchandise and to get hired by Nike: “I want to make a mark on the world.”
He sketches his designs before he sends them to manufacturers in China. Shipping costs are a nightmare, but Lee says it’s still cheaper than manufacturing in the United States.
He posts the lightning-bolt shorts on his website for $60, then immediately slashes the price to $35 to make it look like they’ve been marked down.
On the South Side, Jamari Jackson is selling his T-shirts for $15, setting up outside Kenwood Academy High School,where he is a senior. Kanye West’s “Good Morning” blares from a small speaker as seniors mill around the folding table that Jackson set up, signing each other’s new T-shirts with rainbow-colored markers.
Once class lets out, students flood Jackson’s stand. One calls home for permission to buy a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “See No Evil” in faded black letters.
Two other student designers who go to Kenwood show up to check out the competition. Keyon Hackle and Jacob Hunter, who run a brand named CLRVNT, did a recent pop-up of their own, where they gave free clothes to students. Several months ago, the teens also gave samples to their teachers, who wore their CLRVNT swag to school.
“We’re only in our first year and we’ve already generated about a quarter million in sales,” Hackle says. “So I can see us on that path to making millions of dollars.”
Aside from Hackle and Hunter, Jackson can name five other streetwear brand owners who go to Kenwood.
“At the end of the day, it is a market, so there’s always naturally going to be that competition,” Jackson says. “But we kind of work around each other.”
Tevence Smith, another student who started his own streetwear brand, says he’s doing it to create art. Smith’s brand is Oswalt. His earliest designs were heavy with lightning bolts and clouds, inspired by the Greek god Zeus. But he says his clothes also tell the story of the Black community in Austin, where he lives.
“Clothes mean a lot to us,” Smith says, “whether it’s the way you tie your shoes, whether it’s the way you wear your pants. Clothes [are] a way to express yourself, a way to be free” from the problems plaguing his people, like violence and racism.
He looks up to the late Virgil Abloh, a Black designer from Rockford who became famous by melding streetwear with luxury fashion as the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton whose designs went “beyond clothes,” Smith says. “It’s art pieces. And that’s how I like to look at my clothes as well.”
Abloh died of cancer in 2021. Smith says sometimes he watches videos of Abloh’s fashion shows on YouTube for inspiration and dreams of one day hosting his own runway in Paris like Abloh did.
“To know someone from a small town like Rockford can make it gives me hope,” Smith says. “It helps me keep pushing forward.”
