In 1973, in the rec room of a Bronx apartment building, Clive Campbell—stage name: DJ Kool Herc—and his sister, Cindy, put on a “Back to School Jam” party. Boys paid 50 cents for entry; girls paid 25. As per his sister’s suggestion, Kool Herc used two vinyl mixers to play disco and funk tunes in a loop. His friend Coke La Rock grabbed a microphone and shouted over the track. It was a momentous occasion. Hip-hop was invented then and there, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.
That year, every crumbling street corner in the Bronx sprang alive with “Masters of Ceremony” (or “M.C.’s,” as they became known) and nascent D.J.’s, who remixed dated disco records. In 1979, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang, hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Over the next 10 years, the obscure musical genre began to trickle into the mainstream.
Fashion didn’t follow at first. In 1979, the Sugarhill Gang still dressed in plain denim jeans, tight tops, and cropped jackets. In the early 80s, Grandmaster Flash wore silk tops and fur caps, but these didn’t catch on, either. The Queens group Run-DMC first started attracting attention with its all-black-everything look—Lee jeans, sweatshirts, and dark glasses—and its 1986 song “My Adidas,” an ode to the shell-toe sneakers, landed them an endorsement deal.
Big-brand euphoria took hold in the late 80s. It wasn’t just about the clothes but about aspiration and upward mobility. Dapper Dan, an haute couturier of street style, silkscreened designer logos onto bomber jackets. His Harlem boutique, on 125th Street, was open 24 hours a day. A few blocks away, Salt-N-Pepa turned spandex and asymmetrical haircuts into high fashion, while Queen Latifah, with her music video for “Ladies First,” steered the conversation toward Pan-Africanism. She and guest rapper Monie Love wore head wraps, pantsuits trimmed with kente cloth, and Egyptian crowns.
Mainstream designers didn’t appreciate hip-hop’s knockoff style (Dapper Dan was sued by various big fashion brands) until Russell Simmons launched Baby Phat, in 1992, which attracted A-list celebrities Naomi Campbell and Mary J. Blige and was embraced by department stores. The rest is history. By 2017, in Gucci’s cruise collection, Alessandro Michele was paying homage to Dapper Dan’s balloon-sleeve fur-paneled bomber.
“Within the hip-hop community,” the rapper Slick Rick explains, “fashion has never been just about a look. Much more important is the euphoric feeling.”
In tandem with the Museum at F.I.T.’s new exhibition comes the publication of Fresh Fly Fabulous: 50 Years of Hip Hop Style. Photographs by Janette Beckman, Jamel Shabazz, and Ernie Paniccioli run alongside a foreword by Slick Rick and interviews with Dapper Dan and April Walker. The volume’s euphoric pages take us from 1520 Sedgwick Avenue to the world beyond. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor for AIR MAIL