Julia Michaels has “Issues,” and how hip-hop musicians led to a fashion upheaval.
One in a series of stories on the genre’s rise from the streets to cultural dominance. Hip-hop musicians led a revolution transforming street and athletic attire into pricey high fashion.
For his fall 2017 women’s fashion show, designer Marc Jacobs sent models down a stripped-down runway at New York’s Park Avenue Armory wearing tracksuits topped with thick gold chains, retro-style coats and eccentric headwear, a hat tip to hip-hop’s early days in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Jacobs’ collection was inspired, he said, by two things: the 2016 Netflix documentary “Hip-Hop Evolution,” which chronicles the rap’s rise from the ’70s through the 1990s, as well as memories from his own New York childhood.
“It is a gesture of my respect for the polish and consideration applied to fashion,” Jacobs said in a statement, “from a generation that will forever be the foundation of youth culture street style.”
That’s just one example of how hip-hop and high fashion have been intertwined since the 1970s. In the 1980s and ’90s, hip-hop stars RunDMC, LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa and others put their personal style on display. Today, no one bats an eye at Kanye West’s much-hyped Yeezy line of apocalyptic-themed apparel and accessories for Adidas or clutches their pearls when ASAP Rocky stars in advertisements for Dior Homme or Calvin Klein.
While the hip-hop community has long been enamored with the fashion world, the love has been reciprocated as luxury labels including Balmain and Saint Laurent embrace hip-hop artists and mimic their aesthetics.
The same can be said for luxury Italian brand Gucci’s partnership with Dapper Dan, the underground Harlem designer who made flashy clothing featuring the recognizable logos of Gucci, Louis Vuitton and other labels cult hits despite (or perhaps, because of ) his wares’ dubious origins as knockoffs.
In recent seasons, an onslaught of hip-hop fashion styles — baggy pants and nostalgic ’90s athleticwear — have populated high-end runways, another sign of how hiphop and fashion influence each other. (Jay-Z wrote the song “Tom Ford” as a nod to the fashion designer; Ford returned the shout-out by sitting Jay-Z and his wife, Beyoncé, front row at his fall 2015 runway show in Los Angeles.)
Center stage
This year’s Grammy nominations make it clear: Hip-hop as a musical genre and the artists who populate the industry are at the center of culture. And beyond awards shows, hip-hop players such as Nicki Minaj, Drake, Cardi B and Pharrell now dictate major pop-culture and fashion trends.
However, it wasn’t long ago that hip-hop was warily looked at as an insurgent movement tinged with danger, particularly with the rise of N.W.A and the East Coast/West Coast rap rivalry, making the genre a hard sell for any overlap with luxury brands. During those early years, hip-hop artists weren’t necessarily seeking a place in the luxury fashion world. But image, how one displays him or her style choices, has carried a certain level of social capital in the black community.
“Fashion has always been an important part of the hip-hop identity because fashion has always been an important part of black identity in America,” says producer and filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, director of the 2015 hiphop fashion documentary “Fresh Dressed.” “Because when you don’t have much ownership over where you can land in society, your financial situation, your educational situation, the one thing you can control is the way you look.”
Plus, there’s a celebratory aspect to looking good. “Having great fashion was a way to express yourself and to show off,” says Elena Romero, an adjunct assistant professor at the City College of New York and author of “Free Stylin’: How Hip Hop Changed the Fashion Industry.” “Fashion was a way to showcase your aspirations or your abilities to make it or make it out.”
Stylist Matthew Henson agrees. “Our culture has aspects that are rooted in looking good despite having little to nothing to work with and making the best of it, and this comes from the church experience,” says Henson, who works with artists including ASAP Rocky. “You wear your best. That transcends to now — being proud of your appearance. Not only be good at what you do, but you have to look the part to be seen as an equal.”
Hip-hop’s initial outsider status allowed the genre a certain freedom and playfulness that has since gone from exception to rule. Today, streetwear dominates; track pants and hoodies are the new suit and tie, and slim silhouettes have given way to a looser, slouchy one. Sneaker culture, often tied to hiphop culture, has also exploded, with websites dedicated solely to chronicling the minutia of casual footwear.
Hip-hop artists presented this relaxed street fashion to the masses, first through television (MTV and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” were touchstones) and, years later, through the internet and social media. Just look at Valentino with its spring 2018 ready-to-wear collection filled with louche tracksuits and Balenciaga’s sporty four-figure windbreakers as being examples of hip-hip’s trickle-up effect.
More important, all of this is the foundation for a new generation of fashion labels including Public School and Los Angeles-based John Elliott, led by fashion entrepreneurs who aren’t just adopting hip-hop postures as a trend but using them because they embody the milieu in which they grew up.
Perhaps most crucially, hiphop’s use of reinvention was most prescient of today’s style of dress. The idea of remix culture has been a core tenet of hip-hop music, taking existing musical motifs and mixing them together to forge a new sound.
Anything goes
In hip-hop, it’s common to wear high-end or preppy clothes mixed with oversized sportswear items. That ethos of anything goes — mixing high and low, ironic and serious — is now industry standard and, in many ways, it reflects a world defined by the cut-and-paste randomness of life in the internet age.
While mass culture has leaned toward hip-hop culture, it didn’t start this way. “In so many ways, hip-hop is a reflection of society and environment, wherein folks who are denizens of the culture, do not see themselves, do not see themselves in mainstream culture,” Jenkins says. “So they say, ‘How can we see ourselves in our own terms while borrowing the things we appreciate — even if these brands don’t appreciate us?’ ” That defiant attitude and desire to reinterpret styles serves as a foundational principle of hip-hop fashion that has crossed into the mainstream.
Perhaps one of the greatest lessons hip-hop has taught the fashion world has been every man is a brand. Hip-hop artists have learned quickly that making music is just one small part of their cultural imprint. Consider hip-hop’s early days when Adidas struck a $1-million deal with Run-DMC after the group performed the song “My Adidas” — it’s considered to be rap’s first endorsement deal — or Sean Combs’ savvy move from music to apparel with the 1998 launch of his label Sean John or Kendrick Lamar’s collaboration with Nike. Others including Karl Kani, Carl Jones of Cross Colours and the team behind FUBU (led by “Shark Tank” judge Daymond John) have made clothes expressly designed for hip-hop audiences.
Viewed cynically, it’s an artist selling out, but in the hip-hop community, where “making it” has long been the goal for many artists, these hangups don’t exist. (As Jay-Z once rapped, “I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man.”) Few would deny there’s almost nothing more American than financially capitalizing on a moment.
No stereotyping
As for the luxury industry, it would be remiss to not capitalize on hip-hop’s cultural cachet, especially when brands such as Christian Louboutin and Givenchy are namedropped in songs. But it should take care, as Henson says, to not exploit it in “a stereotypical way.”
“When people are speaking out about cultural appropriation it is because fashion has a huge platform,” says Henson, “and it forces people to live through that interpretation which is to say the least, difficult and exhausting.”
Henson adds that he recognizes the dual-sided nature of hip-hop’s commercial ascent. “Brands are changing their messaging. They are starting to include people of color because the minority dollar is strong,” the stylist says. “That has a good side and a bad side. It can be predatory, but there is a little bit of a leveling of the playing field and that has to do with hip-hop artists and their power and influence and what their voices can do.”
To be involved with the hip-hop community is to participate in the defining mood of the zeitgeist. Luckily, fashion and hip-hop are constantly in flux, evolving in ways bold and barely perceptible.
“You can’t really put your finger on it, but you know what hip-hop is when you hear it,” Romero says. “That’s a good way to describe hiphop style. You can’t pigeonhole it anymore. It wasn’t meant to be that. What was once considered different is now everyday. And hopefully that is a reflection of society.”