PARIS — “We all started off envisioning ourselves as a boy band,” Heron Preston said.
He, Virgil Abloh and Matthew Williams: They were young, hungry and marketing-savvy, working behind the scenes — for Kanye, for Nike — and ricocheting around the periphery of fashion and music in the hazy days of the 2010s.
Under the collective label Been Trill, they were boy brand as much as boy band, D.J.ing and throwing parties but also making merch for those hip enough to get the joke. First they sold T-shirts themselves, then through department stores angling for a piece of their cool, then finally at the teen retailer PacSun.
Now it is 2019. All three are on the official calendar of Paris Fashion Week. This is the way the guard changes: Suddenly, you look up and the periphery is at the center.
Heron Preston, fall 2019.
Now here is Mr. Preston, who made the leap onto the Paris schedule on Tuesday. He staged a Transportation Security Administration fantasy, complete with bag scanners and metal detectors, through which the models sailed in their parachute-cloth best.
Giant screens alternated images pulled from the T.S.A.’s Instagram page with a live feed of guests entering the show. Look closely, and you might have caught Mr. Abloh, whose Off-White show was scheduled Wednesday, or Gunna, a next-big-thing rapper who popped backstage after the show. Will Welch, the newly ascended editor of GQ magazine, was front row. GQ has had its skinny-tie era. Now it has Mr. Welch, with tattooed hands and tie-dyed socks. Thus does the page turn.
Mr. Preston, after the show, compared the trio’s arrival to that of the Japanese designers, who came to Paris in the 1980s to show collections and changed the course of fashion: Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons.
It was a bold comparison, one that Mr. Preston, with his chore coats and ripstop pants, paramilitary vests and barbed wire necklaces, doesn’t yet live up to. His collection had too few surprises; finally in its moment, not ahead of it. But as the Japanese fomented a movement — and its own army of acolytes, black-clad “crows” as they were called at the time, who lined up at their shows — so have Mr. Preston, Mr. Williams and Mr. Abloh.
There’s no denying the kind of streetwear this cohort has been making since the days of Been Trill has stormed the citadel here, and seeped into labels far beyond their own. So much so, Mr. Preston said backstage, that a fan had complained to him that streetwear’s ascendance had ruined it.
“Maybe it needed to be ruined to get a new rebirth,” he said. “Maybe this is the next chapter. Now that we’re on this stage, we can write the history in a new way.”
