If streetwear has a pulse, music is the heart that drives it. There isn't a single iconic streetwear garment that doesn't have, at some point in its history, an artist behind it—wearing it, resignifying it, or simply making it impossible to ignore. And to see this clearly, it's enough to track a single garment: the three-stripe tracksuit.

ONE JACKET, HALF A DOZEN SUBCULTURES (THE 70S)

In 1967, Adidas launched the Beckenbauer tracksuit, intended for soccer. But the streets adopted it long before fashion did: in 1970s Jamaica, Bob Marley and reggae wore it from head to toe. In England, football "casuals" used it as a status symbol in European stadiums. In New York, the b-boys of the first breakdance battles chose it because it was, literally, the only clothing that allowed them to move like that. Three continents, three different reasons, the same jacket.

HIP HOP TAKES CHARGE (THE 80S)

In Harlem, Dapper Dan repurposed luxury fabrics into custom-made pieces for artists, and that connection between his work and music was sealed on the cover of Paid in Full (1987), where Eric B. & Rakim posed in Chanel tracksuits designed by him. In 1986, Run-D.M.C. turned the Adidas tracksuit into the unofficial uniform of rap with their song "My Adidas"—the label signed a 1.5 million dollar deal with the group, what the industry describes as the "big bang" of the financial relationship between sports and urban music. The Beastie Boys and LL Cool J took the aesthetic even further.

THE WHOLE WORLD WEARS THE SAME JACKET (THE 90S AND 2000S)

While hip hop dominated in New York, gabbers in Rotterdam danced to techno at full speed wearing that same tracksuit. In the UK, Oasis and Blur zipped it up to the neck as a symbol of working-class pride during Britpop. In Tokyo, FRUiTS magazine documented hyper-colorful versions of the look in Harajuku. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, it became the "official uniform" of the Russian gopniks.

In 2000s hip hop, the influence became more specific: Cam'ron normalized men wearing pink, Pharrell popularized patch-filled NASCAR-style jackets, MF DOOM turned his mask into an icon, and Ghostface Killah wore Team Canada hockey jerseys that Drake still wears today.

KANYE WEST: FROM CLOTHING FAN TO INDUSTRY ARCHITECT

Few artists have changed the relationship between music and streetwear as much as Kanye West. In 2008, he tried to launch Pastelle, his own line that mixed Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, and American Apparel. It was never officially released to the market, but it became so legendary that an original jacket once sold for 10,000 dollars. In 2009, he designed two sneaker silhouettes for Louis Vuitton—the "Louis Vuitton Dons"—and that same year, Nike released the Air Yeezy, one of the first major signature sneakers from a non-athlete artist.

In 2013 came Yeezy with Adidas, the collaboration that would end up creating its own secondary resale market. A year earlier, in 2014, his Yeezus tour merch changed the rules of the game: limited pieces sold through PacSun proved that an artist's merch could function as a real fashion brand, not just a simple concert souvenir.

GRIME: BRITISH STREETWEAR BECOMES INDEPENDENT

In the United Kingdom, grime built its own chapter. Skepta and Stormzy modernized the tracksuit as a symbol of Black British identity, and that culture ended up creating its own industry: Corteiz, the brand that Highsnobiety describes as "the biggest name to come out of UK streetwear in this decade," collaborated in 2025 with BBK (Boy Better Know), the collective founded by Skepta, JME, Frisco, Jammer, and Shorty, on its twentieth anniversary. Corteiz founder, Clint Ogbenna, even funded the reissue of the photo book that documented the origins of the grime scene.

PUNK AND RAVE: CLOTHING AS RESISTANCE

On the other side, punk provided its own manifesto. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren dressed the Sex Pistols with their Seditionaries line; ripped fabrics, safety pins, hand-printed provocative slogans. Decades later, rave culture had its own revival on the runways: designers like Christopher Shannon and Cottweiler reclaimed the psychedelic colors and wide silhouettes of the 90s, not as hedonistic nostalgia, but as a commentary on the anxiety of a new generation.

SKATE ENTERS THE GAME, AND THE RUNWAY CLOSES THE CIRCLE

In 2014, Palace Skateboards began its annual collaborations with Adidas, making the tracksuit a coveted piece among skaters as well. And in the last decade, that same object that started on European soccer pitches ended up being reinterpreted by Demna at Balenciaga and by Grace Wales Bonner in her own collections; the street, once again, dictating what happens on the runway.

Sixty years after Adidas launched that tracksuit intended for soccer, the garment passed through Kingston, Rotterdam, the Bronx, London, and Tokyo, and at every stop, a different musical genre reinvented it. That is, at its core, the real history of streetwear: it isn't written by a single brand or a single city. It is written by music, one scene at a time.