Your New Streetwear Obsession, SPRMRKT, Might Be Next to the Salami

On the unofficial first day of summer, the hottest spot on Shelter Island was the supermarket. Range Rovers and station wagons, freshly deposited from one of the two ferries that provide access to the Hamptons enclave, pulled into the parking lot of the local IGA at a steady clip. It was the Friday before Memorial Day, and the weekend crowd was stocking up for the first cookouts of the season. 

Most shoppers, fresh in from Brooklyn and Manhattan, beelined straight to the produce and beer aisles. But some peeled off to browse the streetwear. 

“Today is going to be crazy,” said Anthony Peronace as he tidied up a rack of heavyweight, logo-covered sweatshirts. Peronace manages the IGA branch, owned by his parents, day in and  day out. But he’s also the founder and designer of SPRMRKT, a line of fashion merch that he’s sold out of the grocery store since 2018. Behind him in his dedicated shop-in-shop, a refrigerator glowed next to a display of embroidered bucket hats and SPRMRKT-emblazoned tote bags. Inside the fridge? More hats, and graphic tees packaged like cuts of USDA prime steaks. 

As the name suggests, the gear is, broadly, grocery themed. The SPRMRKT logo features a wire shopping cart, and certain details reveal an intimate familiarity with the grocer lifestyle, like a tote bag emblazoned with the PLU numbers for popular produce. Other pieces scratch the itch for Shelter Island merch that rises above the basic embroidered dad hats you can find next to the sunscreen at the local pharmacy. One of Peronace’s most popular sweatshirts, for instance, features an undersea melange of dolphins and starfish. 

There’s also a smattering of offerings that, in contrast to the island’s beachy environs, wouldn’t look out of place in the clout corridors of Soho, like a black mockneck shirt with a futuristic logo, and an oversized hoodie with an artfully rendered alien head across the back. One rack looks like a yacht club swag department went a little nuts, the other looks more like Balenciaga, if Demna had grown up stocking shelves in small town S