Fashion mogul offers stylish memoirs
You can always trust an autobiographer who discloses a childhood memory in which he and his siblings “had to smack a cereal box twice on its side … to make sure we got the roaches out before we started pouring it into our bowls.”
This might seem a strange point to begin assessing remembrances as enthralling as those of Daniel R. Day, betterknown as “Dapper Dan,” fabled Harlem fashion mogul and groundbreaking virtuoso of luxury logobearing streetwear. Still, minor anecdotes such as the one about the cereal box attest to a fine-tuned sense of detail that one would expect from a legendary clothes designer and culture hero.
Through the 1980s and ’90s, decades rife with crime, crack plagues and economic instability, Dapper Dan built his 125th Street store — along with his brand and reputation — on a method of printing name-brand logos (Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Fendi) for custom-made casualwear and suits.
The Harlem gangsters comprising his first wave of high-profile customers were soon joined by myriad black superstars such as Big Daddy Kane, Mike Tyson and Jay-z. How Daniel Day reached this prominence makes for a classic tale of black self-invention, an “Up From Slavery” for the hiphop era.
Day grew up hungry in mid-20th-century Harlem, “though we didn’t know we were poor because everybody we know was struggling like us.”
By 15, Day had dropped out of high school, finding education and economic development through various forms of hustling, whether through petty theft, shining shoes or, most lucratively, what he calls “firing coffee,” or shooting • “Dapper Dan: Made In Harlem” (Random House, 304 pages, $28) by Daniel R. Day
dice. He was also getting into “the drug game” and was only able to get clean of heroin addiction during a three-month jail stretch on breaking-and-entering charges.
From that point on, the story assumes a moreor-less ascendant curve: Day forsakes a Columbia journalism scholarship for a summer tour of Africa, where he “fell in love” with both the clothing and the tailoring styles he encountered on the continent. African clothes, Day recalls, “fit me better than anything I’d ever bought or shoplifted from a store in New York.”
A few years later, he returns to Africa as part of the pop-music festival accompanying the 1974 Muhammad Ali-george Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire. During a delay, caused when Foreman was hurt in a sparring accident, Day roams other African countries looking for “things to wear” and solidifies his calling to make “people look fly.”
Day conveys both his streetwise philosophy and the details of his life with a coolness that forgoes selfpity or simplistic bromides (for example, “If I can do it, so can you”).
If Dapper Dan is telling his readers anything, it might be nothing more complicated than this: I was often tempted to count myself out, but I didn’t. Look what happened and draw your own conclusions.