Third World No More: Re-Branding Indonesian Streetwear

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Fashion Practice, Volume 5, Issue 2, pp. 203–228DOI: 10.2752/175693813X13705243201496Reprints available directly from the Publishers.Photocopying permitted by licence only.© 2013 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Third World NoMore: RebrandingIndonesianStreetwearBrent Luvaas

Abstract

Indonesia is home to dozens of high-end couture designers and thou-

sands of local, independent clothing labels. But despite a rapidly grow-

ing garment industry, it remains firmly outside the fashion world map.

This article chronicles the efforts of Indonesian fashion designers and

apparel companies to establish a name for themselves internationally

by carefully cultivating distinctive brand identities. It documents and

critiques two primary branding strategies within Indonesian fashion,

identified as “self-orientalizing” and “strategic anti-essentialism.” It

then provides an in-depth discussion of the latter strategy, its relative

Brent Luvaas is Assistant Professor of

Anthropology at Drexel University and

Co-Editor of Visual Anthropology

Review. He is the author of DIY Style:

Fashion, Music, and Global Digital

Cultures (Berg, 2012) and is currently

completing an ethnographic study of

street style bloggers. Follow the

progress of the project at www.

urbanfieldnotes.com.

[email protected]

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limitations, and its recent innovations through the example of Indo-

nesian independent streetwear companies like Airplane Systm and

Unkl347.

KEYWORDS: Indonesia, branding, streetwear, apparel

The Biggest Fashion Scene You’ve Never Heard Of

Ask any editor at Vogue, Elle, or Glamour who their favorite contem-

porary Indonesian fashion designer is and they are likely to draw a com-

plete blank. It would be hard to blame them for that. Indonesian

fashion has, at least until recently, “kept a mostly low profile” (Amed

2010). It has simply not yet shown up on their radar. Not, however,

because of any lack of talent to choose from. With a population of

238 million people, Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest nation. It

is also Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, growing at a staggering rate

of over 6 percent per year. It has a middle-class customer base of

more than 50 million people, and is predicted to grow to 140 million

by 2014 (The Economist 2011). It also has a rapidly expanding “crea-

tive class” (Florida 2002) of urban professionals and edgy entrepre-

neurs with more than its share of fashion designers among them.

There are, quite literally, thousands of Indonesian clothing brands,

from upscale ready-to-wear (Amed 2010) to modest Muslim chic

(Jones 2007, 2010). And these are not just small-time, low-rent oper-

ations. Home-grown couturiers like Priyo Oktaviano, Payou, Daro

Baro, and Sebastian Gunawan produce daring, distinctive, and metic-

ulously tailored clothing that has already become a staple among the

archipelago’s well-heeled elite, a crowd, a decade ago, far more likely

to be seen in Prada or Givenchy. Nonetheless, these designers remain

obscure at best by international standards, an exotic niche market in

a still Western-dominated industry. The fact is that Indonesian design-

ers face an uphill battle in seeking to take their place among the world’s

better-known brands. Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city and commercial

hub, has none of the mystique of Milan, none of the prestige of Paris. As

far as the select cadre of global fashion opinion-makers is concerned,

Indonesia’s role in fashion has been strictly behind the scenes, on the

factory floor, rather than at the drafting table.

In the era of global capital, the production of fashion—like virtually

all production—has been decisively split between its material and im-

material dimensions (Gilbert 2006; Hardt and Negri 2001; Lazzarato

1996; McRobbie 1998). Design and marketing happen on one side of

the globe; manufacture on the other. And where Indonesia falls in

this divide is no mystery to anyone. Indonesia, after all, has become a

major center for outsourced clothing manufacture in recent years, as

its economy shifts from a predominantly agricultural base to a largely

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industrial one (Nevins and Peluso 2008; Robison 2008). Manufacture

for export is now its central focus, and textile and apparel produc-

tion one of its biggest sectors. Fashion, loosely defined, has become

the number two industry in Indonesia, an 8.5 billion dollar per year

(Chongbo 2007) enterprise that employs millions of workers and thou-

sands more marketers, managers, and executives. No doubt this has

been a boon to many Indonesians. And yet it has it downsides. Where

Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, The Gap, Penguin, and Converse, among

many other companies that make use of Indonesia as a manufacturing

center, get to sew their brand name into the stitching of their garments,

the role of Indonesians in this process is obscured by anonymity. “Made

in Indonesia” reads the inside label. It may as well say “Made by

Nobody You’ve Heard of.” Indonesia, in other words, suffers from a

decidedly post-millennial brand of global fashion marginality: the mark

of the Third World sweatshop. It is a mark—debased and devalued,

and still stinging from the imprint of colonialism—that a generation of

young Indonesian designers, industry professionals, and fashion retailers

is determined to scrub off.

Today’s Indonesian fashion labels want the world to know that In-

donesia is an emergent center for fashion, not just a cheap supply of

labor for other people’s products. They have partnered with the Minis-

tries of Tourism and Industry, along with cities and other municipal

bodies, foreign non-profits like the British Council, and a variety of

local and international corporations to “educate” the global fashion

industry—and Indonesians themselves—about the quality of Indonesian

products and the innovation of Indonesian design. Workshops, exhibi-

tions, and trade fairs take place with increasing regularity in Jakarta, as

well as other centers of the Indonesian fashion world. The centerpiece

of this promotional initiative, however, is no doubt Jakarta Fashion

Week, held annually since 2008 at the upscale Pacific Place Mall in

South Jakarta. Industry insiders from around the globe are invited to

the capital city to witness firsthand a showcase of the country’s most

exciting talent. Sponsorships are secured from companies ranging from

Bank Republik Indonesia (BRI) to Nokia and the Body Shop. The pre-

dictable barrage of advertisement ensues.

But what brand identity does Indonesian fashion promote for itself

through these events? How do Indonesian labels represent themselves

and their products to the outside world? And what image do they proj-

ect to them? What, in other words, is the branding strategy of those

Indonesian fashion labels hoping to be noticed in the international

arena, and how effective has it been in drawing attention to the Indone-

sian fashion scene?

In this article, I draw from thirteen months of ethnographic field-

work in Indonesia’s independent streetwear scene, around a dozen in-

terviews with Indonesian fashion designers, observers, and label owners,

and visual analysis of garments and advertisements, to suggest that

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there are essentially two strategies pursued by Indonesian fashion

labels in hopes of achieving these goals, one which places Indonesia

itself front and center in a label’s branding efforts, and another that

aspires towards a sort of generalized internationalism, in which Indone-

sian aesthetics at best have no place and at worst taint a brand by

association. Neither strategy, I conclude, has been entirely effective.

I argue that both strategies inadvertently marginalize Indonesian

fashion labels in the international fashion industry, either marking

them as fundamentally “Other,” or failing to distinguish them from

hordes of similar labels elsewhere. In other words, they maintain the

postcolonial status quo (Kusno 2000), perpetuating a stark inequality

between the West and “the rest” (Bhabha 2005; Mbembe 2001; Said

1979). I then proceed to focus primarily on the second, and most

widely practiced of these branding strategies, using Indonesia’s indepen-

dent streetwear scene, the subject of my dissertation research and recent

book with Berg Publishers (Luvaas 2012), as my primary example of

the practice. It is a strategy, I argue, that holds a certain visceral

appeal for Indonesian fashion labels, linking them to an imagined

global movement, and distancing them from imposed nationalist and

colonial notions of what it means to be Indonesian. And yet, it does

little to carve out a distinct niche for Indonesian brands in the global

marketplace. Their internationalist orientation, ironically, fails to

grant them an international presence. Finally, I chronicle some recent

trends in Indonesian streetwear that might represent a path out of

this predicament, a rebranding of the very meaning of “Indonesian”

in Indonesian streetwear that may yet expand its appeal beyond the

archipelago’s borders.

To Orientalize or Not to Orientalize:A Question of Branding

The first branding strategy I discuss in this article is the one most often

employed by the renowned couturiers invited to showcase at Jakarta

Fashion Week, Indonesia Fashion Week, and the country’s highest

profile fashion events. It is also, not coincidentally, the branding strat-

egy the Indonesian state has been most comfortable supporting, a strat-

egy quite compatible with their own long-term aims of establishing and

reinforcing an Indonesia-wide national identity (for a small sample of

the vast literature on this subject see Adams 1998; Anderson 1983;

Atkinson 2003; Brenner 1999; Foulcher 1990; Heider 1991; Kusno

2000; Rutherford 1996; Sen and Hill 2000). Simply put, this is the strat-

egy of instilling Indonesian fashion with a distinct—and immediately

recognizable—local flavor. It means using traditional motifs from the

island nation’s myriad cultural groups in both garments and advertise-

ments—though with a heavy emphasis on Bali and Java—along with

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traditional techniques, such as batik and ikat within the manufactur-

ing process, to highlight the unique aesthetic contributions that Indo-

nesian fashion has to make. A generous observer might term this

strategy “fusion” or “creolization,” or to use a term more common

in the literature on Indonesia, “syncretism” (Geertz 1960; Pemberton

1994). It is a hybrid aesthetic, elegant and chic, that infuses Western

garments, from cocktail dresses to business blouses, with the weight—

and charm—of local tradition. It is a strategy seeking to merge the

island nation’s diverse regional traditions into a single recognizable

look, one, it is hoped, that is at once “modern” and based in an autoch-

thonous lineage (Kusno 2000). In this, Indonesian fashion has much in

common with Indian fashion (Dwyer 2006; Tu 2009), Senegalese

fashion (Mustafa 2006), Brazilian fashion (Brandini 2009), or even

Chinese fashion (Clark 2009; Pang 2012), all industries struggling to

cultivate their own distinctive national brand identity, appealing to a

home-grown middle class, while cultivating an international market.

A critic, on the other hand, might see it a little differently, as an ex-

aggeration, perhaps, of one’s own exotic characteristics for the sake of

capturing someone else’s imagination. The late literary theorist Edward

Said might have shorthanded this strategy as “self-orientalizing” (see

Kondo 1997; Said 1979). Indonesian designers, through their dramatic

cuts, shapes, and painstaking detail work, self-consciously play up the

exotic appeal of their clothing, feeding Western stereotypes, and pro-

moting a perspective on Indonesian fashion that runs the risk of regres-

sive or reductive readings. Here, Indonesian fashion is unquestionably

Indonesian fashion. It could not be confused with Italian, Parisian, or

Japanese fashion. There is no missing its place of origin. Self-orientalizing

Indonesian couturiers have effectively stamped their garments with a dis-

tinctive national brand identity, carrying on a project of nation and iden-

tity building that extends back before the Indonesian revolution against

the Dutch (Anderson 1972; Kusno 2000) and which has become such

a fixture of life in the independent republic as to have taken on its

own oppressive weight (Kusno 2000; Luvaas 2009). They find themselves

confined to a limited palette of predetermined cultural expressions, con-

forming to imposed expectations of what Indonesian fashion can and

should look like (Anderson 1990; Brenner 1999; Jones 2003; Luvaas

2009; Pemberton 1994; Rutherford 1996).

The irony of such postcolonial ambitions, notes Kusno (2000), is

that they so often replicate the older structures of power. Postcolonial

subjects, over centuries of outside rule, internalize the aesthetic and dis-

cursive categories that define the difference between colonizers and col-

onized. And newly independent nations harness the in-built aesthetics

of domination for their own ends (Anderson 1990; Kusno 2000; Pem-

berton 1994), forging nationalism out of the wreckage of colonialism.

This may result in beautiful, decorative work, and a distinctive sartorial

aesthetic, but it is hardly a recipe for cutting-edge couture.


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Anti-Essentialism as Branding Strategy

The second strategy, however, and the focus of this article, is one

that might be labeled, following Lipsitz (1994), as “anti-essentialist”

(see also Baulch 2003). Whereas self-orientalizing couturiers strive to

infuse their products and marketing with a distinctly Indonesian

flavor, anti-essentialist labels strive to strip theirs of any distinguishing

ethnic characteristics, producing garments that are virtually indistin-

guishable from those of fashion scenes thousands of miles from Indone-

sia’s shores. While the previous strategy has largely been the domain

of Indonesian couture and high-end ready-to-wear labels, this strategy

has been the marked specialty of Indonesian independent (or “indie”)

streetwear brands, a category, by the way, growing by hundreds of

labels with each passing year. Through graphic T-shirts, military-style

jackets, skinny jeans, athletic shoes, and a standardized array of pull-

overs and hoodies, Indonesian streetwear brands have positioned

themselves as part of a global movement, players in a larger scene no

different from those in Los Angeles, Tokyo, or London. In doing so,

they place themselves on the same level as designers elsewhere, rejecting

Indonesia’s marginal position in the global fashion industry, and assert-

ing their own value as creative and proactive contributors to interna-

tional trends. They also—again, not coincidentally—succeed in outright

defying governmental agendas of constructing an Indonesia-wide cul-

ture out of the region’s myriad local traditions. This is fashion without

any symbolic connection to Indonesia’s carefully manicured national

identity. It is fashion whose loyalties lie elsewhere, with youth subcul-

tural scenes far beyond Indonesia’s national boundaries.

These brands do so, however, at a significant cost. Indonesian street-

wear design still frequently suffers from an insipid sort of genericism

that makes it difficult for designers elsewhere to take it seriously as a

force of innovation. It has not brought in buyers from around the

world, has not succeeded in making its presence known to an interna-

tional audience. It has so far failed, in other words, to define its own

niche—exotic or otherwise—in the global marketplace. Of course, that

has never been its primary motivation.

A Brief History of Indonesian Streetwear

The important thing to know about Indonesia’s independent streetwear

scene is that it was never, and still is not, a fashion scene per se.

Launched in the late-1990s by a collection of young skaters, surfers,

and self-described punks and metalheads, Indonesian streetwear grew

out of an initial interest in music and extreme sports. It was only later

that those involved began to shift their attention to garment production.

This, I have been told by such pioneering Indonesian streetwear brands

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as Unkl347, Airplane Systm, Monik, and Reverse, was largely a conse-

quence of the Asian Financial Crisis that struck Indonesia in 1997. The

gist of the story is that over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s,

as Indonesia relaxed regulations on international trade and invested

heavily in its industrial sector, a new middle class began to emerge to

market, manage, and maintain that sector (Dick 1985; Gerke 2000;

Heryanto 1999; Lev 1990; Robison and Goodman 1996). This new

middle class, in turn, enjoyed a lifestyle unimaginable to previous gener-

ations, with access to a wide range of imported consumer goods, includ-

ing skateboards, surf T-shirts, athletic shoes, and rock music. Subcultural

styles from the USA and Europe became quite visible on the streets of

urban Indonesia, and an eclectic underground music scene flourished

(see Baulch 2007; Sen and Hill 2000; Wallach 2008). Young people in

urban locales like Bandung and Jakarta prided themselves on their cos-

mopolitan sensibilities, their sophisticated tastes, and their relatively

obscure stylistic allegiances that separated them from the great pack of

ordinary Indonesians. And then, to make a long story short, the value

of the Thai baht precipitously dropped, sending shockwaves throughout

the Asia-Pacific region. Banks went bankrupt. Businesses shut down. The

newly established Indonesian middle class, at least temporarily, shrank

back to its pre-expansion numbers. Many hip young urbanites found

themselves in a position where they could no longer afford the imported

consumer goods to which they had become accustomed. Pirated goods

flourished, as did discount merchant fairs, and other cost-saving enter-

prises. Families cut back. And kids shared access to goods and services

to stretch their own status further (Gerke 2000).

For a small portion of middle-class youth in Bandung, West Java,

however, there was an even more elegant solution. If they could no

longer afford to buy rock T-shirts, board shorts, and skate-wear, well

then, they would just have to make them for themselves (Iskandar

2006). And why not, they figured? Bandung, around three hours by

train from Jakarta and a popular weekend destination, had been home

to a modest textile industry for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s that

industry expanded to become the nation’s premier destination for gar-

ment manufacture, a place tapped by prominent foreign companies as

a cheap and reliable source of manufacturing labor. It was, then, rela-

tively easy to get a hold of the materials and machinery young people

would need to make their own apparel.

W. Satrio Adjie, owner and founder of one of the earliest of the In-

donesian streetwear labels, ironically named No Label Stuff (or NLS),

explained to me back in 2007 that businesses like his began as “truly

DIY” (do-it-yourself) affairs, using old sewing machines and second-

hand or improvised silkscreens to create items that mimicked, as closely

as possible, the styles of clothing they could no longer afford. They

made only enough items to meet their own clothing needs at first, then

gradually expanded their production to give such items away to friends


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and other acquaintances, before beginning to actually sell them at con-

certs, street-side stalls, and eventually at small, semi-permanent “distri-

bution outlets,” dubbed “distro.” Distro, a term borrowed from the

zine distributors of the 1990s USA and UK, refers to boutique-style

shops that began to specialize in such homemade clothing, along with

DIY cassettes and magazines produced by friends and other acquain-

tances in the growing “indie” network (Iskandar 2006; Luvaas 2010,

Uttu 2006, Wallach 2003). In Bandung some fifty distros are now clus-

tered in the alternative fashion district of Jalan Sultan Agung and Jalan

Trunojoyo in the northern part of the city (Figure 1).

Indonesian Streetwear Today

Today, Indonesia’s indie streetwear scene includes thousands of youth-

owned brands at any given time, and at least as many distros selling

Figure 1Distros along Jalan Sultan Agung in Bandung. Photograph by the author.

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their products. Business of Fashion estimates that Bandung alone is now

home to around 1,300 distros (Amed 2010). I find this number a bit

high, but it still captures something of the magnitude and expansiveness

of the scene. There are now several semi-formal leadership structures,

including the Kreative Independent Clothing Kommunity (KICK), Cre-

ative Entrepreneur Network (CEN), and the Indonesian Independent

Clothing Association (IICA), who lobby government bodies, organize

exhibitions and events, and set community standards for appropriate

business practices and ethics. The events these organizations put on,

most notably the annual KICKfest with its several satellite festivals in

Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and elsewhere, often attract tens of thousands

of visitors, and do hundreds of thousands of dollars in retail sales.

KICKfest Bandung 2010, for instance, according to KICK, brought in

some 52,000 visitors over three days, despite significant rainfall and

mud at the festivals outdoor location. Yogyakarta’s KICKfest the

same year brought in around 75,000. While most Indonesian streetwear

labels operate well beneath public attention, bringing in barely enough

to cover costs, if even that, the top labels, including Unkl347 and Invic-

tus in Bandung, Satellite Castle and Cotton Ink in Jakarta, and Starcross

and Slackers in Yogyakarta, sell several thousand units a month,

nothing like the volume of international streetwear brands like Stussy

or A Bathing Ape, but quite significant nonetheless, particularly by

Indonesian standards. Many of the newest labels in the scene, such as

Hunting Fields, Deer, Magic Happens, and 16 D-Scale, sell their

wares in the Level One local fashion arcade at Grand Indonesia Shop-

ping Town, one of Jakarta’s newest and most elite shopping centers.

Other labels, like Monstore, Pot Meets Pop, and Tosavica sell theirs

from The Goods Dept, now located at the same Pacific Place Mall

where Jakarta Fashion Week is held. Many, such as denim labels

Easton and Peter Says, sell theirs primarily online. Indonesian indie

streetwear brands have now sponsored Indonesian film productions,

“endorsed” popular rock and indie pop bands, and donated their

names to any number of events in the archipelago, from heavy metal

concerts to the recent TED Bandung conference. They have also ex-

panded their offerings to include athletic shoes, caps, and in some

cases, more upscale, ready-to-wear items such as dresses, blouses,

button-down shirts, and blazers. Some labels, including Unkl347, have

begun selling their products internationally in such places as Singapore,

Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, and even, as of 2010, Berlin. Indie streetwear,

in other words, is now a relatively big business in Indonesia, and its

national profile is at an all-time high, with significantly more brand aware-

ness among urban Indonesian youth than the more prestigious couture

and ready-to-wear lines exhibiting at Jakarta Fashion Week.

Nonetheless, the larger Indonesian streetwear scene has remained

committed to a set of collectivist, non-competitive ideals commensurate

with the punk rock roots of many of its participants. As Dendy


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Darman, co-founder and owner of Unkl347 told me on a recent trip to

Bandung, the scene’s resources and visibility are greater than they have

ever been, but “idealism still has its place.” The brands involved still

support and promote each other. They may be big now, he says, but

they are “still indie,” a term, that for Dendy implies integrity, authen-

ticity, and a steadfast refusal to sacrifice one’s own personal vision for

the sake of profit. Brands like his see themselves as mentors to the

younger entrants into the scene, models of how to do business without

compromising one’s principles. Such a status has earned Dendy the

nickname of “Uncle D.” He is one of the scene’s elder statesmen, its

most respected members.

One of the ways Unkl347 maintains this exalted status is by provid-

ing a workable alternative to clothing production as usual. They

produce their products in-house in a converted warehouse in Southern

Bandung (Figure 2), by their own staff of factory workers, whom they

consider among their network of peers, friends and fellow scenesters,

rather than as expendable labor. They are paid similarly to designers

and managers, and considered part of the larger Unkl347 family.

Such brands’ commitment to elevating the local community and enact-

ing ethical business practices is meant to stand in stark contrast to

the foreign companies who exploit sweatshops down the street from

Unkl347. They become a local force of resistance to transnational dom-

ination, “Cotton Warriors” as a poster for a recent KICKfest event

put it, striking back at the international fashion industry on behalf of

Indonesian youth. This alternative status, of course, is a critical compo-

nent of such clothing lines’ self-identity and branding strategy.

Figure 2Unkl347’s humble office/warehouse in

Southern Bandung. Photograph by

the author.

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The Anti-Essentialist Aesthetics of Locality

It is this commitment to place and community that defines one of the

most interesting paradoxes of Indonesian indie streetwear: the simulta-

neous embracing of and distancing from locality. Central to street-

wear’s branding in Indonesia is its production in Indonesia. That is,

its complete production in Indonesia—from its design right through

to its manufacture—by Indonesian youth committed to the larger

streetwear scene and its shared ethic of “do-it-yourself” (DIY). This

is Indonesian fashion, we are continually reminded, made by and for

Indonesians. Consider, for example, advertisements for the annual

KICKfest in Bandung. “Get real!” exhorts one of the posters, plastered

on public walls and poles throughout the city, “real Indonesian

fashion,” the statement implies, rather than transnational imports or

their knocked off equivalents. Get the stuff designed here by us, it

could have said. “Speak louder!” implores another, expressing its faith

in the ability of fashion to communicate powerful ideas and empower

local youth through cultural production. The streetwear scene’s adver-

tisements for itself are rife with references to locality, from the near ubiq-

uitous “Buy local” to the more radical “Support your local brand

revolution!” Buying is equated with politics and friendship, as with a

recent poster for IICAfest that uses the catchphrase “Never give up my

friends!”

And yet, there are some striking contradictions to this message. Most

conspicuously, it is one that is almost always composed in English.

English, of course, is increasingly taught in Indonesian schools from

an early age. It is the language of international commerce, the language

of Starbucks and Facebook, the language of movies playing in mall

cineplexes. It is also a language incomprehensible to the majority of In-

donesians. Most participants in the streetwear scene, despite relatively

high education and a decidedly middle-class status, struggle with it

themselves. Expressing the localist sentiment, then, always requires

translation into a transnational idiom.

Consider the following advertisements for Airplane Systm, a

Bandung-based streetwear line that stems back to the late 1990s, as

posted in Suave Street Brand Catalog, a free local publication and major

advertising venue for streetwear brands, in 2007. The first (Figure 3)

features Hendra Jaya Putra (Hendra), best known as the keyboardist

in Rock N Roll Mafia, an electronic dance music act with a fair

degree of national recognition. He is dressed in dull denim jeans and

gleaming white sneakers, a sky blue T-shirt adorned with a simple

image of what appears to be a mixing board, an image that mirrors

the actual mixing board he is holding under one of his arms. Over

the T-shirt, he wears a white hooded sweatshirt unzipped, decorated

in a dot and zigzag pattern with the hood up. He is looking away

from the camera, his face a mask of cool detachment, while he sits


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on a metal platform, possibly a bleacher. The atmosphere is vaguely

postindustrial, vaguely post-apocalyptic, and 100 percent concrete jun-

gle, complete with factory blandness and a mesh wire fence blocking

the skyline. This is somewhere in a city, we can tell, but which city is

a total mystery. It is as indistinct an urban landscape as they come.

What matters in this picture is not where it has been shot, but where

it references: “the street,” a place both everywhere and nowhere.

The second image (Figure 4) is of Rektivianto Yoewono (Rekti),

singer for the garage rock revivalists The S.I.G.I.T., also from Bandung.

He is dressed in signature simple denim, a pair of black high-top shoes

on his feet, two white lines reminiscent of the Adidas trademark adorn-

ing their sides. His shirt, a black, Western button-down, has the collar

Figure 3Hendra Jaya Putra looking decisively

“street” in his hoodies and sneakers for

a print advertisement for Airplane Systm

in Suave Magazine. Used with

permission from Suave Magazine.

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popped. His longish black hair is stylishly disheveled, and he is reclining

in a barren, brown landscape, some rocks to one side, some cinder

blocks behind them, an amplifier on the other side with the vowel-

less “MTHRFCKR” scrawled across it. In the front right corner, the

words “ROOTS DNM” plaster the page. The look on Rekti’s face is

a pensive pout. The mood of the picture is pure urban decay. This is aes-

theticized isolation in an urban “non-place” (Auge 2009), an isolation,

in fact, that is an utter rarity in a bustling metropolis like Bandung, one

that has to be sought out, or more likely, invented.

Or consider this more recent advertisement campaign for Greenlight

(Figure 5), a Jakarta-based streetwear company with outlets in malls all

over the archipelago—a company, in other words, already occupying

Figure 4Rektivianto Yoewono modeling rock ’n’

roll blase in a print advertisement for

Airplane Systm in Suave Magazine.

Used with permission from Suave

Magazine.


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something of an uneasy space between “indie” and “mainstream” (we

might call them a “mindie” streetwear line). The advertisements take

place in a lush tropical rainforest—quite unusual for a streetwear

company—and are shot, one must assume, somewhere in the Indone-

sian archipelago. And yet, in this image, peering out from behind a

tree in the background is a large giraffe, a creature of sub-Saharan

Africa, not in the least indigenous to the region. There is also a skeleton

seated in an intricately carved wooden chair in the foreground of the

image, conjuring up some vaguely archaeological associations, with a

stuffed bald eagle (also not indigenous) perched on its arm. Plus, the

two models in the image—one male, the other female—are of ambigu-

ous ethnic descent, light-skinned, with dark brown hair and possibly

Eurasian (or simply European) features. Most likely they are what Indo-

nesians term “Indo,” of mixed Indonesian and European (usually

Dutch) ancestry. In other words, they look very little like the bulk of

Greenlight’s customer base. This, of course, is intentional. Indonesian

Figure 5A print advertisement for Greenlight in

Suave Magazine, shot in a jungle in

Nowhere-Land. Used with permission

from Suave Magazine.

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streetwear advertisements frequently feature models of European de-

scent, usually exchange students, tourists, expats, or the occasional

wayward anthropologist like myself who have somehow come into

contact with members of the scene. For brands, models of European

or Eurasian descent imply sophistication. They lend immediate inter-

national cachet. Or to use the words the directors of the five or so ad-

vertisement campaigns I personally starred in would use, it is simply

cooler (lebih keren) to shoot white people (bule). But even when Indo-

nesian models are used in streetwear advertisements—and the majority

of models are clearly Indonesian—they are depicted, almost without ex-

ception, in neutral settings, in places with no identifying local features,

or alternatively, in fantasy landscapes, constructed in Photoshop and Il-

lustrator (Figure 6). Indonesians may star in these ads, but Indonesia

itself is never the star.

Figure 6An advertisement for Satellite Castle in

Suave Magazine, featuring a cartoon

model in the Guy Fawkes mask popular

among Occupy protesters, standing in a

fictional landscape. Used with

permission from Suave Magazine.


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Designing for Nowhere in Particular

Like the advertisements it produces, the clothing emerging from the In-

donesian indie streetwear scene references a global urban everywhere.

This is an urbanity without locality, a city that is nothing but pure ab-

stracted “street.” That said, there is no easy way to characterize the

designs of Indonesian indie streetwear labels. It is a noticeably diverse

field, with differing tastes and aesthetic sensibilities represented, despite

the close-knit nature of the scene. Some of the longest standing labels,

including Unkl347, Invictus, Ouval Research, and No Label Stuff, draw

a clear line of descent from West Coast American skate and surf labels

from the early 1980s, most notably Stussy, Powell Peralta, Ocean Pacific,

and Santa Cruz. Their designs, particularly their early ones, borrowed

the cut-and-paste graphic orientation of these labels, especially Stussy’s

habit of defacing the trademarked iconography of established corpora-

tions. Designs by Unkl347 and Invictus skewer international brand

names, turning, for instance, the Lacoste alligator icon on its head and

positioning it to eat the former name of Unkl347 (appropriately then

called EAT), or substituting the word “Invictus” for “Intel” in the familiar

“Intel Inside” logo. This is brand parody in its simplest, most direct form,

playing with corporate imagery in ironic and sometimes critical appropri-

ations of the symbols of international commerce (Luvaas 2010).

Other streetwear labels, such as Satellite Castle, Wadezig, and

Endorse, seem to take their cues from more recent incursions into inter-

national streetwear, including Japan’s A Bathing Ape, Miami’s Billio-

naire Boys Club, and Los Angeles’ Invincible and Fuct, labels at least

as influenced by hip-hop as by skate, punk, and surf. Still others, like

Triggers Syndicate, Rockmen, God Inc., and Arena, link their products

to the stark, and sometimes schlocky, blood and bones basics of heavy

metal and hard rock. Still others, including Cotton Ink, Liberate-

Affairs, Tosavica, and 16 D-Scale, bridge the gap between streetwear

and ready-to-wear, producing intricately tailored blouses, loose cotton

dresses, and up-market denim products with price tags often double

those of other brands.

What each of these labels does share aesthetically, however, is an in-

ternationalist orientation. They steer clear of the self-orientalizing ten-

dencies of higher end brands, attempting to stay as up to date as possible

in global streetwear trends, while eschewing any self-representation

that smacks of marginality or contrived national identity. Print, when

it appears on T-shirts, hoodies, caps, or boxers, as in advertisements,

is almost exclusively in English. Images are borrowed from an interna-

tional repertoire that includes brand iconography, references to rock

and pop albums, images of target signs, French poodles, and robots,

and the repetitious death rock doom and gloom of skulls and cross-

bones. Jeans taper towards the ankle in the popular skinny style of

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the moment. Belts are thick with graphic buckles. Caps, often imprinted

with insignia reminiscent of American sports teams, are worn with the

bills flat, as in the current hip-hop style, with its emphasis on just-out-

the-box pristineness. To put it simply, Indonesian streetwear would be

immediately identified as streetwear by anyone anywhere with a passing

familiarity with the style.

NLS’s 2011 catalog, for instance, featured a line of basic T-shirts

with such internationally oriented parodies printed upon them as

their brand name converted into the flag of Saudi Arabia, a rework of

the World Cup logo, and a tweak of the classic “I ♥ New York”

T-shirt with their own Pegasus symbol substituted for the heart and

“NLS” replacing “New York” (Figure 7). These are works with a satirical

edge, and yet what exactly is being lampooned in them is unclear. Rather

than cutting to the bone or conspicuously commenting, they seem sim-

ply to play with global brand iconography, have fun with familiar

imagery, and thereby take a certain ownership over it, stamp it with

their own brand identity. “The international is ours,” the message

seems to read.” It belongs here too.” And yet, this cut-and-paste aesthetic

has another function as well. It establishes NLS’s credentials as legiti-

mate fashion remixers in the longtime streetwear tradition of Stussy,

Fresh Jive, and Fuct. Appropriation here becomes a method of symbolic

participation (see Luvaas 2010). It advertises NLS’s position as part of a

larger international, and often irreverent, streetwear movement.

Figure 7A 2011 design by Bandung brand No

Label Stuff. Used with permission from

No Label Stuff.


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The 2011 NLS catalog also featured a repertoire of more staid, and

less controversial fare: Western-style plaid flannel shirts, camouflage-

print caps, multicolored hooded sweatshirts, and baggy skater shorts,

for both men and women. In this, it quite closely resembled their 2010

catalog, as with the catalogs of dozens of other Indonesian streetwear

lines. It adhered, in other words, to a genre, at least as prescripted as

the self-orientalizing work of Jakarta couturiers. This is streetwear. Period.

But who is this streetwear meant to appeal to? Who is their target

market, and how does NLS go about appealing to them? In interviews

with a number of indie label owners and designers, there were two

demographics that came up again and again: “ABG” (anak baru gede—

teenagers, literally children just grown up) and “anak muda” (youth—

roughly between the ages of sixteen and thirty) from middle-class

backgrounds, a constituency that now numbers in the tens of millions.

They are targeting relatively well-off Indonesian teenagers, using their

symbolic connection with international streetwear as a means of selling

local products. One label, Airplane Systm, even goes so far as to park

their “Airbus One” mobile “distro on wheels” in front of Bandung

high schools and junior highs just as they let out. Indonesian street-

wear, in other words, presents itself as a substitute for imported street-

wear, a cheaper alternative, available to a wider variety of middle-class

youth, despite the politicized rhetoric of buying “local” and keeping

it “real.” This fact is clear enough when you look at any number

of NLS’s product pages in Suave Magazine (Figure 8), which feature

images of teenagers wearing their products, a selection from their col-

lection surrounding them. The link is also evident in their “Nippon

berry” design for girls in the bottom left-hand corner of the advertise-

ment. This is work in alignment with global streetwear trends, but hes-

itant to shoot too far out front ahead of them. It is, in a sense, quite

conservative.

There is, then, an interesting conflation going on here between

“going international” and selling “local.” In practice in the Indonesian

indie streetwear scene they amount to the same thing. Local customers

are interested in their products to the extent that they represent an in-

ternational streetwear aesthetic. And being in alignment with interna-

tional streetwear trends also feeds the fantasy of eventually branching

out to an international audience. Adjie, like nearly every label owner

I met in Indonesia, always had an international market in the back of

his mind. An imagined international gaze remains the measure of

success for these labels, despite a consistent rhetoric of local support.

But are these labels actually ready to go international? Do they have

what it takes to do so?

Gammara Fiermandaputra, writer and editor of Red and White

Magz, the most widely read blog to chronicle brands and events in

the Indonesian streetwear scene, does not think so. The problem with

Indonesian streetwear, he explained to me via Skype recently, is that

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it has so far failed to establish its own identity. Look at Los Angeles

brands like Invincible, he told me. They play with local sports labels,

infuse their products with the indelible mark of place. But Indonesian

streetwear labels avoid anything that smacks too heavily of Indonesia.

They are afraid such items will not sell, whether in Indonesia or anywhere

else. To them, “Indonesia” remains a tainted term, a mark of their Third

World identity, proof of their second-rate status. They want their clothes

to read as “streetwear” first and Indonesian only as a vague, and rela-

tively unimportant, afterthought. “Oh, that was made in Indonesia?”

goes the ideal imagined response.” I never would have guessed.”

Figure 8A page from Suave Magazine, then

Suave Street Brand Catalog, 2007.

Used with permission from Suave

Magazine.


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Ironically, at least as Fiermandaputra and other observers of

Indonesian streetwear I have talked to believe, it is Indonesian street-

wear’s steadfastly internationalist orientation that makes international

success so unlikely. Who, after all, cares about yet another street-

wear company making brand parodies and standard issue hoodies?

How could such a company possibly stand out among thousands of

similar labels the world over? Indonesian streetwear, it seems, may

need to take its cue from higher-end Indonesian couture labels and

find some way to communicate to an international audience its fashion

scene’s own unique contribution. But how to do so without giving in

to someone else’s idea of what Indonesia is? How do streetwear

brands stay true to their own vision and make themselves internation-

ally appealing at the same time? And how do they make themselves

appealing to a global market without potentially alienating the local

one?

Conclusion: Rebranding the “Indonesian” in“Indonesian Streetwear”

These are questions Indonesian streetwear labels are also asking them-

selves. Established companies like Unkl347, Satellite Castle, and In-

victus, each of whom has begun explicitly targeting an international

audience, have been wondering aloud how to do so for years now.

Unkl347 has sought to do so simply through the innovativeness of

their designs, which as time goes on, have become increasingly bold, so-

phisticated, and sleek. They have hired and collaborated with a broad

range of designers, artists, thinkers, and musicians to push the bound-

aries of what constitutes clothing design, even branching out into archi-

tecture, music, and publishing. They experiment, diversify, crank out

new designs and never look back, and as their company has grown

larger, have divided up into seven subdivisions, each with its own em-

phasis and target market. This strategy, arguably, is the reason Unkl347

remains the best known of Indonesian streetwear brands. But to a

casual observer, there remains nothing conspicuously “Indonesian”

about their designs. There is nothing that sets this work apart from

comparably innovative streetwear from Japan, Europe, or the USA.

Unkl347 still risks disappearing unnoticed into the swelling crowd of

global streetwear brands.

Other labels, such as Invictus, have taken a different approach. They

have maintained the emphasis on classic streetwear, while slowly, but

surely, making Indonesia a more and more conspicuous subject of

their designs. Recent T-shirt graphics have featured text in the national

language of Indonesian, including, for example, a recent series done in

collaboration with the Jakarta-based indie rock band Lyla. One such

T-shirt reads “Lebih Dari Bintang” (More than a star). Another recent

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one, designed in collaboration with the longtime alternative rock band

Slank, reads “Maju Terus, Pantang Mundur” (Go forward, never back-

ward). Interestingly, Invictus only began pursuing this strategy after

their owner, Dicky Sukmana, returned from formal training at the

London College of Fashion a couple of years back. It took sustained

time abroad, it seems, for him to begin to see Indonesia as a possible

asset to his brand, rather than a mark on its image. Indonesia, in

other words, has to be rebranded in the hearts of Indonesian designers,

along with, of course, their Indonesian customers, in order for them to

rebrand Indonesian streetwear. It must be distanced from nationalist

and colonial projects, made into something Indonesian youth can claim

as their own.

And this is precisely what seems to be happening. The theme of In-

donesia now enters into the designs of a number of indie streetwear

companies, including such new additions to the streetwear universe as

the Jakarta label Damn! I Love Indonesia (owned by former MTV In-

donesia VJ Daniel Mananta) and the Yogyakarta art school provo-

cateurs Indie Guerillas. Damn! I Love Indonesia’s upmarket T-shirts

feature national heroes, particularly icons of the Indonesian revolution,

characters from the Javanese wayang kulit (shadow puppetry), and na-

tionalistic rhetoric presented in bold but simple designs. Other labels,

such as Monstore and Tosavica, recruit popular Indonesian artists to

adorn their high-end fitted T-shirts with original graphics, often using

the detail, repetition, and filigree associated with Indonesian batik

and ikat. And yet, even explicitly nationalistic content tends to be writ-

ten in English. Plus, it remains evident that obvious references to Indo-

nesia are the exception rather than the rule among Indonesian indie

streetwear labels. There remains among streetwear labels the persistent

suspicion that to make use of Indonesian designs and motifs is to sell

out something of oneself.

Nonetheless, a distinct style is beginning to emerge from Indonesia’s

indie streetwear scene, a fusion of fine art, graffiti, graphic design, and

ready-to-wear that increasingly employs the natural cotton and stylized

simplicity of an international “slow fashion” movement. It looks noth-

ing like conventional notions of what constitutes Indonesian style, and

yet it retains something recognizable about it, a hybrid of the local

and the global, the traditional and the modern, that is perhaps best

described as “syncretic,” a term frequently used by anthropologists

to describe the dynamic incorporation of the foreign into the local

that has long been characteristic of the diverse archipelago’s people.

The hope of this newest wave in Indonesian streetwear is to infuse

the very idea of Indonesia with a new flavor, the way, perhaps, early

Bronx and Brooklyn-based streetwear labels succeeded in doing for

their borough, redefining the very meaning of the place from style

slum to fashion capital. As Indonesian streetwear grows to greater inter-

national prominence, bleeding across borders into Malaysia, Singapore,


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and Australia, and bringing in larger and larger numbers of fashion

industry representatives for its frequent events, its reputation has al-

ready come a long way. Whether or not this translates into recognition

beyond Southeast Asia remains to be seen.

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