Union’s distinctive subject is the relationship between things that might sit in separate fashion categories. A graphic shirt, a tailored coat and a reconstructed sneaker can become parts of one wardrobe when someone gives them a shared context. The store’s history follows the people and cities that made those combinations possible, with buying and styling as important as the products themselves.
Two beginnings on different coasts
Union began in New York’s SoHo in 1989, founded by James Jebbia and Mary Ann Fusco. Eddie Cruz opened the Los Angeles operation in 1991 as The Stüssy Union. Chris Gibbs joined the New York shop in 1996 and moved to Los Angeles in 2003. These are different stages, with Gibbs later becoming an owner.
Union’s own historical account describes a place for youth culture, music and art, connected to clothing from elsewhere. Its buying principle was personal: stock things the team would wear, balancing usefulness with unusual design. That helps explain the shop’s role as an editor, putting local creativity beside discoveries from Japan, Britain and other places.
Union’s account of its history and buying approach
That editorial role also depended on ordinary shop work. In Nike’s Passport Pack interview, Gibbs recalls handling accounting, shipping and receiving himself. The detail grounds the cultural story in a small business. Taste had to be maintained through deliveries, orders and daily decisions before it could be expressed as a widely circulated collaboration.
Japan became a continuing part of that exchange. In a 2023 interview, Gibbs described longstanding ties with Japanese customers and confirmed Tokyo’s 2018 opening and Osaka’s October 2022 debut. The relationship moved in both directions: Japanese fashion shaped the store’s selection, while Union developed its own physical presence within that market.
The familiar made newly personal
The 2018 Air Jordan 1 project gave this approach a particularly visible form, with contrasting sections and exposed stitching suggesting a reconstructed vintage pair. Contemporary release coverage separated Union’s November 17 launch from wider Black Toe distribution on November 24. The design treated an established sports object as something that could carry the shop’s own reading of the past.
The launch setting extended the idea. Esquire documented a mirrored retail installation built for the collection, placing the vintage-inspired products inside a deliberately constructed experience.
Union & Company carried the buying approach into Nordstrom in 2019. Chris Gibbs and Sam Lobban selected 13 brands for temporary shops whose design drew on Union Tokyo. Beth Gibbs styled the campaign. This translated a boutique’s combinations into a larger retailer while making selection, interiors and image-making visible parts of the collaboration.
During the 2020 Air Jordan 4 release, Union’s Spread Love initiative featured local Black-owned businesses and shared sneaker sales with them, according to GQ’s contemporary reporting.
Beth Birkett’s wider curatorial work also belongs to this account. Nordstrom’s 2021 Black_Space project named her among five Black creatives presenting fashion and beauty through their own perspectives. The example makes clear that Union’s surrounding creative network includes distinct practices and voices, with styling and cultural selection extending beyond a single shop or shoe.
A relationship woven into the product
Andscape identified Chris and Beth Birkett Gibbs as Union co-owners in its August 2023 interview. Their Summer ’96 collaboration with Jordan and Bephies Beauty Supply drew on the year they met in Brooklyn. The story shifted the source material toward a shared personal history, bringing the couple’s memories into a public collection.
In Nike’s design account, they connect that period with knitted and woven clothing. The woven treatment of the Summer ’96 Air Jordan 1 makes the reference physical: texture gives a remembered period a tangible form. It also makes the shoe part of a broader conversation about clothing, craft and the way people dressed together.
Chris and Beth Gibbs discuss Summer ’96
The official contact page, checked on October 13, 2026, lists Union Los Angeles at 110 South La Brea Avenue. That address anchors the American profile while the documented Japanese openings establish a wider history. The Los Angeles chapter belongs to a network of exchanges whose origins reach back to New York and continue through later generations of creative work.
Union Los Angeles contact and address
Read together, these episodes suggest a particular kind of retail continuity. Union can change the labels it stocks or the object it redesigns while keeping attention on how pieces meet: across cities, within an outfit or between collaborators. Its historical interest lies in those decisions, and in the people whose experience gives the combinations their meaning.
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For the wider context, explore Sneaker History and Culture: From Rubber Soles to a Global Movement.
