STYLE: Current Nostalgia Brings Global Streetwear to Charlotte

Dylan Foster-Smith had his streetwear outlet all but set up: seed funding, business plan, firm grasp of clientele. All he needed were marketing materials like a logo, colors, and, well, a name. “I was really kind of struggling with it,” he says. “One day, I was just kind of sitting around on a Saturday, just chillin’. I was listening to the record Currents by Tame Impala. It’s one of my favorite albums. It was, like, my 200th time listening to it. And all of a sudden, ‘Current Nostalgia’ just popped up in my head.”

He Googled it. The search produced one hit—a 2017 AudioTechnology magazine review of the album. The headline: “Tame Impala’s Current Nostalgia.” The Australian indie-pop act works vintage influences into its contemporary music, much as streetwear in general, and Foster-Smith in particular, tweaks established patterns and brand images. Foster-Smith’s next stop: GoDaddy, where he bought the currentnostalgia.com domain name for $10.

“All within, like, one minute,” Foster-Smith says. That was a few years ago, before he’d made enough money to open the store we’re sitting outside of on an autumn Saturday afternoon at Camp North End. Since then, literalists in his life have occasionally pointed out that “current nostalgia” is a contradiction in terms. Well, no kidding, (oxy)moron. That’s the whole point. Streetwear crawls with sly defacements of its antecedents—a kind of fashion version of sampling—to both poke at and refresh them.

Three years ago, Foster-Smith was working as a web designer and selling streetwear online but realized, “I could probably make this a business—and this is way more fun than web design.”

Take what Foster-Smith happens to be wearing today: a gray hoodie from Palace, a London skateboard and streetwear brand that’s twisted the familiar rainbow Apple icon into the pyramidal Palace logo, a deliberate act of brand subversion. “It came out probably eight years ago, so if you found a brand-new one of this, someone’ll pay, like, 600 bucks,” he says. “Especially with streetwear, a lot of things are references—hence Palace, Apple, this is a retro logo, and they made their version. So my art style is current nostalgia, and that’s the brand name.”

Palace is one of the streetwear brands Current Nostalgia carries, along with Supreme from New York City, Brain Dead from Los Angeles, and Patta from Amsterdam, a particular inspiration for Foster-Smith. He discovered Patta in 2012, when, at 21, the Lake Norman-area native worked a summer internship for a Dublin-based payments company. When he graduated from High Point University the following year, having majored in entrepreneurship and marketing, he thought he might make a career working for a payments company.

But the streetwear bug had bitten him along with the entrepreneurship insect—as a kid, he immersed himself in early-2000s skater fashion, Osiris shoes and such. After less-than-satisfying ventures into sales and freelance web design, he began to sell his own and others’ shirts and sneakers about three years ago and, in April, opened the Camp North End shop.

As of October, Current Nostalgia carried 16 brands, including Nike. Foster-Smith says that number has doubled in the past year, and shoppers spend as little as $48 and as much as $1,200. The location adds to the dopeness, too—especially in light of competitors like 704 Shop, a South End retailer that opened its storefront in 2017 and holds the exclusive right to sell merchandise branded by the City of Charlotte.

“It’s really just about finding what we like and what kind of flows with our style,” Foster-Smith says. At Camp North End, “you have sneakerheads, your skaters, your hypebeasts, your artists, your musicians. So people just trying to look different than other people—not, like, crazy different. But you come in here, and you’re gonna buy something truly unique. You’re not gonna be sitting out at dinner, and somebody walks in wearing the same thing as you.”

GREG LACOUR is the editor.