Salim Rashamwala

So I'm watching this streetwear brand commercial.

It starts with a guy running on the beach and some inspirational quotes from a narrator.

Believe in yourself.

If you want it, go and take it.

And then it takes one of the harder turns I've ever seen in a commercial to reveal that he is running on the beach toward a boat full of people who look distressed.

It looks like a migration situation and there is a new narrator who is now visible.

She's a black woman in a room full of other black people.

She's saying, life is not a sneaker commercial.

We know the race is full of traps.

We didn't come here in search of a dignified life for us and for our loved ones.

We came here to change the rules of the game, to make them fairer for everyone.

Because it's not just about doing it, but doing it right.

This brand, Topmanta, it's unlike any other streetwear brand I've come across.

Take a streetwear brand like, say, Supreme.

which started in a small 1990s New York City storefront and was marketed with counterculture messaging.

Right now, it's actually a big player in a huge multimillion-dollar industry.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, a group of street vendors who'd been selling goods on sidewalks have found a way to double down on streetwear's outsider roots, birthing this brand known as Top Manta.

I'm Salim Reshanwala, and from TED, this is Far Flung.

In every episode, we visit a different location to understand ideas that flow from that place.

And today, a story from the streets of Barcelona, where a group of immigrants changed the game and, in the process...