Hip-Hop Turns 50, And Still Looks Fly
“Everything is a flashback,” Syreeta Gates said recently. “That’s the way it always is with our culture. Black folks are going to see what’s out there, take it and remix it for themselves and transform it into something else.”
Ms. Gates, the founder of the Gates Preserve, a core source of historical material from the 50-year evolution of hip-hop, was referring to an art form “created, maintained and valued by nonwhite poor folks.”
She was also talking about hip-hop style. That the genre and its look are indivisibly linked was never clearer than during this month’s Grammys, when a 15-minute musical medley brought together a panoply of hip-hop artists, styles, eras and regional variations, with performers as disparate as LL Cool J, Rakim, Queen Latifah and Lil Baby on stage.
The unstated goal of “Fresh, Fly, Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip Hop Style,” an exhibition that opened this month at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, is to track the transformation of an art form born, as the curators Elena Romero and Elizabeth Way wrote, “of the segregation and oppression of communities of color within American urban centers” to its current status as a multibillion-dollar industry and cultural powerhouse.
While designers like Tommy Hilfiger were quick to make connections to hip-hop with product placement on performers like Snoop Dogg in a 1994 performance on “Saturday Night Live,” and brands like Cross Colours, Karl Kani, Walker Wear, Maurice Malone, Mecca USA and FUBU penetrated the mainstream, the establishment, Ms. Romero said, “frowned down upon” hiphop because of “who did the designing and who the intended customers were.”
Now multinationals court fans of the genre, filling ad campaigns with rap stars. In 2018, Kendrick Lamar became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize. And last year ground was broken in New York for the Universal Hip Hop Museum, set to open in 2024.
Yet there is a sense that in historiographic terms we are at the beginning. Even among lauded progenitors of hiphop style like Daniel R. Day, whose Dapper Dan collaborations with Gucci brought global renown, there is an inexhaustible trove of histories yet to tap. What the F.I.T. show has assembled are designs representative of styles created or innovated among small groups that tended to find one another through word of mouth.
There are Dapper Dan jackets, Cross Colours knit caps, Kangol bucket hats like those LL Cool J made famous. From Ralph Lauren’s fall 1998 collection there are ski parkas that were once called suicide jackets because, as Ms. Way explained, “if you wore one, you were sure to get robbed.”
There are Lee jeans with the creases sewn in. There are Afrocentric kufi-style hats of kente cloth like those Salt-N-Pepa wore. There are shearling coats and shell-toe Adidas, like those worn by Run DMC.
There are clothes that look generic unless, as Monica Lynch, the former head of Tommy Boy Records, explained, “you understood the subtleties.” Ms. Lynch, who now consults with Sotheby’s on hip-hop memorabilia auctions, said: “The Lee jeans were perfectly pressed. The sneakers had to be the right sneakers. People were perfectly turned out on no money at all.”
Clothes tell stories, and the one composed in “Fresh, Fly, Fabulous,” as Ms. Gates said, is built on the accounts history often overlooks: “There’s this patchwork quilt culture being created by a group of Black and brown young people with few options and fewer resources,” all making their dash for a version of the American dream.