Earlier this month, Yara Shahidi celebrated International Day of the Girl in an outfit her stylist referred to on Instagram as “woke glamour.” She paired her Prada skirt with a graphic sweatshirt that read “RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE.” The sweatshirt is from the brand HSTRY and of course, Shahidi is repping it.
Kiran Goraya, the label's co-founder along with the rapper Nas (who is Shahidi's cousin!) tells Refinery29, “We're combining fashion with a message [to bring] further awareness to causes we believe in. This past year, [for example, we] donated a portion of proceeds of our Kneeling Santa sweater to the Center for Court Innovation.”
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“It’s a brand that celebrates Nas’s own history growing up in New York, but also of hip hop,” she added. HSTRY is a men’s premium streetwear brand. The aesthetic is heavily influenced by the '80s and '90s, which Nas, who isheavily involved in the day-to-day refers to as “the golden era.” Goraya tells Refinery29, “He launched the brand with no backing. He owned the brand out the gate. This is his baby.”
So it seems obvious that art would imitate life for the brand as the rapper taps into whatever is inspiring him at the moment (“whether that’s film, political leaders from the past, it’s a culmination of various things in history”) to create the pieces that drop every month and a half or so of twenty new pieces, including hats.
While HSTRY has primarily been a sportswear brand, Goraya says it will soon expand to include cut and sew pieces, as well as womenswear. “It’s funny, when [Shahidi] wore the sweatshirt to the [2017 Glamour International Day of the Girl Rally in New York], we were toying with the idea of launching pieces specifically for women,” but the seeing how quickly Shahidi’s piece sold out (click here to buy the t-shirt version) cemented it. So it looks like we can thank the Black-ish star for making sure we’ve got HSTRY goods made just for us.