Men's Triple 5 Soul Fashion Brand

Born in 1989, Triple five Soul originated as a humble storefront in New York City's Lower East Side. Originally entitled with a tongue-and-cheek reference to one of the then-popular telephone party lines, Triple five Soul quickly became focal point for a multi-faceted, quickly emerging cultural movement. The brand name is written both ways - Triple 5 Soul in the directory's listing and Triple Five Soul in the brand's own text. The story opens with a birth year, a neighborhood and a joke of a name: a storefront named for a party line, filed here for young, trendy, smart men, that became a gathering point for a cultural movement larger than the shop.

The Lower East Side starting point matters because everything after it is expansion from a single humble room: a storefront first, a movement's focal point second, a label third. No founder and no founding company are named - the history is told in places rather than people: the Lower East Side, then Lafayette Street, then Williamsburg, then the international wholesale business. For a streetwear brand, that geography is the biography.

Lafayette Street, Williamsburg and Wholesale

In 1997, only months after opening its flagship store on fashionable Lafayette Street, Triple Five Soul began expanding it's international wholesale business. Exponentially increasing coverage in a wide range of fashion magazines, an uncanny and genuine popularity amongst this generation's cultural heroes, and the unorthodox establishment of a base of operations in Brooklyn's then upcoming Williamsburg neighborhood all contributed to Triple Five Soul's broad and fashion-forward visibility as a leader of the street wear industry. Three engines of visibility: magazine coverage, adoption by the generation's cultural heroes, and a base in a neighborhood that was itself becoming fashionable.

Triple Five Soul is more than clothing and the collections have always crossed ethnic, cultural and lifestyle boundaries to deliver streetwear that allows consumers to express themselves. That closing claim is the definition of its subject: streetwear as self-expression, designed across boundaries rather than for a single market. There are two official routes for the brand - its USA and Canada sites - and both are in References below, alongside the directory's standard research routes in this page's links.

Reading This Triple 5 Soul Record

Triple 5 Soul, seventh entry under T in the Men's Fashion Brands directory: born in 1989 as a humble storefront in New York City's Lower East Side, its name a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of the then-popular telephone party lines; quickly a focal point for a multi-faceted, emerging cultural movement; a flagship store on Lafayette Street followed, only months later in 1997, by an expanding international wholesale business; a base of operations established in Brooklyn's Williamsburg; a leader of the street wear industry whose collections crossed ethnic, cultural and lifestyle boundaries. That is the brand in full.