There are plenty of labels and trends that come and go in the menswear world, so the trick for us here at GQHQ is to determine which ones have actual staying power (i.e. ones real men can actually wear) and which are a better barometer of what’s relevant right now in men’s fashion. That brings us to #BEEN #TRILL. It’s a streetwear brand that—thanks to the Internet—has now become "a thing." A thing you’ve seen on our style wave, on Twitter, on Tumblr, and on Instagram— you might even have the #BEEN #TRILL app, which allows you to impose the brand’s aesthetic sensibilities on your own pictures. They launched an overhauled website earlier today, but there are still plenty of people scratching their heads wondering just what #BEEN #TRILL is.

In their own words, #BEEN #TRILL says it’s "an art collective and DJ crew whose image and sound is defined by the frenzy of new youth culture found on the pages of the deep web and on the blocks of big cities." Its members include Heron Preston, Matthew Williams, and Virgil Abloh, guys who’ve had stints as creative directors for Lady Gaga, Nike’s resident "cool hunter," and acted in various creative consulting ways for Kanye West. Like many of today’s popular ear-to-the-street brands, they developed a massive following on their Tumblr, a hodgepodge of mixtapes, music videos, and images with the words "BEEN TRILL" superimposed over them, stylized in a bloody typeface (a nod to New York City’s culture of defacement, where subway posters and wheat-pasted ads often get stickered over or written on for no other reason than simply being there). From an entomological standpoint, the "been" part simply refers to being up on something long before anyone else, while the word "trill" is a portmanteau of "true" and "real," and owes its proliferation to Southern rappers like Bun B who frequently used it.