Is Dime the World's Most Vital Skate Brand?
Dime is, arguably, the world's most vital skate brand. Hardly any other streetwear label comes close.
I'm not just blowing smoke up Dime's ample pant hems: the nearly 20-year-old skate label has notched qualitative and quantitative evidence supporting its modest domination.
For the latter, simply scan Dime's web store. Almost everything released from the first chunk of Dime's Spring 2024 collection, save for a handful of always-available staples and tchotchkes, has sold out.
If that sounds like streetwear business as usual, dare to compare Dime's doings against streetwear's household names.
Stüssy may sell briskly but not this briskly. Palace Skateboards' flashy launches do draw eyeballs, though plenty of stuff stays in stock. Even mighty Supreme, perhaps the archetypal streetwear brand, rarely sells through its entire weekly drop.
Instantly sold-out product was once the sole signal for streetwear success. Now, barely any brand achieves it.
To be sure, that mostly just underscores the lack of any streetwear monoculture — there's just so much clothing made by so many brands in so many places, with so few must-have products (and, at the bigger brands, higher production minimums to boot). And if simply selling out of merch was an actual mark of quality, Taylor Swift would be this generation's greatest designer.
Still, Dime's strong sales are as close as any current brand gets to achieving a once-potent streetwear ideal. And it objectively reflects serious demand.
Nothing in Dime's lineup is pretentious, challenging, or even all that surprising from a company founded by skaters. It is, however, impressively tasteful.
Dime's intarsia-knit sweaters are cleverly impactful but not so outré as to necessitate effortful styling. Its cardigans lightly lean into refined menswear but are hardly stodgy. Its bags range from quilted backpacks to stirringly elegant two-tone nubuck totes.
And everything centers around Dime's irresistible, so-close-to-being-Dior-but-legally-distinct logo, a masterclass in understated branding in a world where presentation is everything.
Speaking of which, Dime's urbane lookbooks are so well-styled, so crisply shot that they look like what you'd get if retro skate magazines shot glossy fashion editorials.
Sumptuous snaps of models clad in librarian glasses and posed in front of crisp backdrops — very '90s J.Crew catalog — make Dime's ribbed sweaters and baggy jeans look like a million bucks, even though they actually retail for pretty reasonable prices.
Because of course they do. Dime is still making streetwear, after all. It's just making it better, showcasing it better, and selling it better than basically everyone else.
Think of it like this: while everyone else in streetwear is tending towards spectacle, Dime is still slinging the perfect streetwear comfort food: unpretentious, uncomplicated, and riotously delicious.
