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StyleZoo YorkJun 18, 2025

How the Supreme and Zoo York Collaboration Went From Inside Joke to Actual Collection

Zoo cofounder Eli Gesner on how, three decades after they began, the foundational New York skate brands delivered their first capsule.

By Lucas Wisenthal
Photo courtesy of Supreme

In 1993, with the popularity of skateboarding at an all-time low, Eli Gesner, Rodney Smith, and Adam Schatz started a skateboard company in New York City, some 3,000 miles and a world removed from skating’s California epicenter. The brand, Zoo York, wasn’t the first to emerge from the city, but it was a faithful expression of it at a time when skating revolved around San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles. 

A year later, in 1994, Supreme opened its doors in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. The store quickly became its own center of gravity, and grew in tandem with Zoo as the East Coast’s skate scene exploded across magazines and videos. Over the decade that followed, Zoo would change hands and find its way into department stores, while Supreme would draw a cult following for its exclusivity.

Now, Supreme and Zoo York are commemorating their entwined histories with the release of a collection that goes on sale this Thursday, June 19.  

Supreme, Gesner says, didn’t want to “do an homage to, like, the 2000s-era Zoo York”—that is, the version of the brand Ashton Kutcher and others posed for. Instead, the collection calls back to the earliest days of the company, leaning on elements like its original tag logo (a handstyle Gesner labored over) and New York City-subway-inspired art, all of which Gesner himself unearthed and helped recreate for Supreme. 

In 2004, after Supreme stopped carrying Zoo, Zoo itself, as a friendly shot, printed up “Zoopreme” boards and gear that borrowed the shop’s box logo. Decades later, a sanctioned collaboration feels right. “All of us at Zoo and Supreme, we all grew up together before Zoo and Supreme,” Gesner says. “This is like our comrades in arms.”

“It’s nice,” he says, “to get your flowers from your friends.”

Is this Zoo collection coming out in conjunction with Alex Corporan’s new 30 for 30 documentary on Supreme? 

I would like to say that that's how smart we all are. But, sadly, no. They're completely independent of each other. I think that Alex’s doc is not sanctioned by Supreme, and it was just complete coincidence, literally complete coincidence. We shot my interview for Alex's documentary, like, three years ago, and I helped co-design the Supreme line about a year ago. 

How did the idea to do the line come up? 

James Jebbia and I go way, way back, but James moved into my neighborhood, so I run into him constantly. I don't know for sure, but I think maybe Todd Jordan had an idea—he really wanted to not do an homage to, like, the 2000s-era Zoo York. They wanted to do an homage to the early 1990s [Zoo]. The original. 

How did it feel for you to revisit these really early pieces and update them? 

Fun. I don't even have nostalgia for it. I've moved so far away from streetwear or fashion or anything like that, so it's just completely uninteresting to me, even to the point of me buying clothes for myself. I just don't care. I don't have a feeling about it. I've eaten that cake so many times. 

But it was nice to see that that there was some sort of legacy that was handed down from Zoo York. And it was nice to be thought of. That’s like my family. So that part of it was really great. It's almost like, because it was sort of an homage to the heritage, it takes a weight off, because it's just like, “All right, well, what are the classic pieces that we’re known for?” And they were the ones who were like, “Oh, we want to do the soccer jersey.” And I was like, “Great. That’s the coolest thing I ever made.”  

I had to kind of rebuild everything—all the graphic usages: the board, there’s a T-shirt graphic, and the Z Line, all the graphics. I'm sure they had their own guys go and do a better job. I rebuilt all the graphics and tried to pull what we could. I don't have any of that saved. Or, if I do, it's on, you know, Zip disks or SyQuest disks in my archives, so I wouldn't even know how to get those things up and running. So it was going on the internet, pulling out old pieces, and redoing everything. When it came to the colorways, I let them do that, because they know their customer. I actually don't even know how the stuff fits. Because, again, whoever their customer is, [they] make the clothing fit to their liking. 

I don’t remember you guys doing jeans in, like, 1993 through, say, ’96 or ’97, but there are jeans. 

There are jeans. I think we might have made some jeans, but we never really had success with the jeans. It's very difficult to get jeans made, obviously, and keep stock and sizes and such. It was difficult: How do you want to Zoo York-ify these baggy jeans? And they were the ones who were like, “Oh, we want to put a tag down the side back pocket.” And I was like, “Looks great.” 

You guys did a beanie with the tag on it—that's the kind of piece you must be able to access pretty easily in your archives. 

I have the Zoo York tag vector art in all of its incarnations saved on my desktop for sure. I don't think I have the complete collection, but I have the vast majority of the Zoo York advertising, because that was really key and instrumental to Zoo’s success: the Thrasher ads and Transworld Skate and Strength and Big Brother. That used to be of such paramount importance in skateboarding, you know? And now no one really, I think, pays attention to that. 

Archival ad (1996) courtesy of Zoo York/The Chrome Ball Incident

Was it tempting to hide the small copy you guys did in the ads in the garments somewhere? 

I think we talked about doing that, but I don't think we ended up doing it. We also were gonna take the audio from [Mixtape, the first Zoo York video]. We kind of blew it. RB [Umali] found the clean audio mix from Mixtape, without the skate noises—just all the hip-hop stuff. And we were gonna give away an audio cassette. We were gonna make mixtapes, but I guess we just fucked up. We got too caught up in other things. 

Is there anything about this that we should talk about that we haven't gotten into? 

It's nice to get your flowers from your old friends. And I think for the people who were there and know where the real Zoo York comes from, and the connection with Supreme, I think that it's a beautiful thing for them. I think that in the best-case scenario for the younger kids, it'd be good to educate the youth about the history of skateboarding and streetwear and where all that comes from. And I think that we're also going to find a bubble of people who only know Zoo York from [whatever] terrible store it used to sell at. 

I helped Steve Rodriguez and Gotham Park try to bring the Brooklyn Bridge Banks back. And we just opened that a couple weeks ago. Seeing footage of kids now skating at the place where I grew up skating, even if they don't know what Zoo York is, that thing is there because of things that happened before [they] were born. So I’m happy to, in the best-case scenario, be part of that with Zoo York and Supreme—of trying to open up people's minds and appreciate their heritage. Because it's their heritage. If you're a young kid who is growing up in New York City now, and you love skateboarding and you love Supreme, this is the result of all of us, like, suffering to make skateboarding acceptable to the mass populace. 

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