Grime got its first serious brand brief somewhere around 2016. UK drill followed. Before that, UK garage. There's always a moment where a scene that's been quietly building its own venues, labels, rules and audience suddenly finds brands knocking on the door.
Usually it goes like this: someone writes a deck, the deck references three YouTube videos and a Pitchfork piece from eighteen months ago, the brief asks for "something that sounds like" the scene, and by the time the campaign lands the scene has already moved on. Or it's so obviously trying to buy into the culture that no one believes it. The work arrives dressed in a culture it doesn't quite fit.
The brands that get it right tend to be the ones who were already there. There's a reason Supreme's early music choices hold up and a lot of their imitators' don't. The relationship with culture was built in, not bolted on. Same goes for Patta, or Fred Perry in its 2010s resurgence.
What makes a sync land when it comes from a subculture context? Timing, partly. But mostly it's about partnering with people who are genuinely embedded in that culture - creative agencies, music supervisors, artists - who were in the room before it became a brief. The best brand-music relationships we've been part of started from a real conversation, not a deck.
Culture belongs to us all - but it takes more than a budget to belong to it.
Photography: Ewen Spencer