Opinion: Anti Social Social Club’s soaring popularity

I guess many of you guys have seen people around wearing hoodies with a bolded Anti Social Social Club on the back, or you might own one yourself. I remember when I first saw kids in my school wearing it, I was confused and at the same time found it funny. Don’t get me wrong, I believe most people will find these words absurd when they first see them.

What is Anti Social… Social Club? So is there a social club for those people who are anti social? Wait… what? After that, I started to see more kids in school and people on the street wearing clothes and hats with the blatant Anti Social Social Club on them. What is the hype about these simple hoodies and antithetical text, I wondered.

After getting home, I eagerly Googled the brand. I went to the ASSC’s official website trying to see what they are selling. To my surprise, every item on the website was sold out, none available for purchase! I later heard from a friend that because the brand is so popular now, there is a supply shortage for their products. In fact, the ASSC is a new street wear brand that has risen up to the same tier as other more familiar names: Supreme, Off-White, A Bathing Ape and so on. It has become one of the hype beast brands that got young people going crazy.

However, the unique thing about Anti Social Social Club is that, unlike Off-White and Supreme, which both have most of their products in stock online, its ongoing unavailable status on its website is creating such a yearning for the buyers. Knowing that people want to get the specials and dress differently from others, Anti Social Social Club successfully utilized this uniformity of mind to create customer demands by holding back their items and constantly making new limited editions.

Also, the price rocketed due to the unavailability. Even though most of their products online are under $100, since they cannot be purchased from online anymore, the price offered by other individual sellers can be over hundreds of dollars, and the waiting time for an order could be months. Thus, angry buyers mock the brand: Anti Shipping Shipping Club. Sure, many impatient people went for the other option, which is to line up in front of the Anti Social Social Club store in Downtown LA for three hours to get the hoodie they wanted.

Secretly, Anti Social Social Club employs a strategy called anti-marketing marketing, which includes reverse psychology. The founder Neek Lurk is a genius who turned psychotic propaganda into fashion. He made the design of his brand his own emotional outlet by turning his melancholia, anger and depression into tangible things.

The texts on his products like “GIVE ME HAPPINESS GIVE ME PAIN,” “GET WEIRD” and the logo Anti Social Social Club itself showcase the embarrassing, offensive and ambivalent ideas that our society tries to hide. Nevertheless, young people today care more about expressing their individuality and would even want to isolate themselves from the mainstream to look cooler. Thus, Anti Social Social Club satisfies their need.

Overall, opinions are split on whether the brand is worth the hype. My friend Viki Park believes that the brand’s logo is very unique, and she likes the concept of an anti-social club because people might not know if that even exist. Meanwhile, my other friend Shiela Strickland thinks the hype is stupid, “Spending a lot of your parents’ money on expensive streetwear is not ok, since we are still in high school.”

Even though, she hesitates in the end, “I actually want to get one.”

Indeed, we can see how successfully the brand wins young customers’ hearts. What about you?