Oh, So This Is What Ya’ll Mean When You Say Hip-Hop is the Only Culture
Or, what’s ok for them is not okay for Us
I have my wind-down websites.
After a long day, I like to settle in to a little NYMAG.com, some Engadget, and a little Wired.
What I really gaze at to slow my brain down though is Sneakernews. Release dates, colorways, special editions, all just words since I’m no “sneaker head.” I ain’t never waited in a line for shoes and I’ll be damned if I pay anymore than the retail price for something.
But every once in awhile, I click on the site and I can feel my blood broiling. Seeing shoes that used to cost $54 now being priced at $150 is annoying but it doesn’t anger me. If Khadijah can sell her used “54.11" Reeboks to some eager collector for triple the original price — go ‘head, sis.
I’ll tell you what pisses me off.
Anytime I see a shoe or a service provided by a large company that resembles something that we thought up when we were kids — something that was once shunned but now celebrated as genius — that gets my temperature rising and my fingers’a typing.
Nike iD? We fantasized and talked about the possibility of such a thing back in the mid-80s, coloring our shoes with markers was the closest we could do.
But what really set me off…Puma + Coogi collabo shoes.
All the things we once did in attempts to be different, to stand out, are now being repackaged and sold back to us at exorbitant prices. That part sucks, but what sucks the most is that we cool with it and drop down our hard earned $s on this knockoff shit.
So let’s talk about these damn pimps for profit and where they got their ideas from.
You may not remember the pre-Jordan world.
In that world your choices were white, black, blue. Those were solid colors. If you wanted two colors — white with a red symbol, white with a blue symbol. That’s why people loved the suede Puma jawns. You could get maroon, white formstrip, blue, white formstrip, black…you get the point.
So seventh grade, 84, we learned the hard way, once you made an attempt to customize a pair of white/grey Puma, trying to get them to match your jumbos (some people called them fat laces), you only had one customization and that was that. That grey formstrip ain’t going back to grey once you colored that thang maroon.
I’m talking about me. I did that. The seventh graders of Falcon Court North thought it was fire. My dad thought, “you won’t be getting any more shoes to ruin.”
Which was fine with me — I started customizing shoes, $5 a pop. Seven customizations meant a new pair of shoes (though I never dared to do that). Started out simply coloring Adidas stripes and Puma formstrips (nobody wore Nike). That advanced to me writing people’s names in their formstrips — that was $7.
By the eighth grade, I just did the designs and people would get them airbrushed on. For $10, I would make designs for the shoes and sweatshirt or jacket.
I got lazy in high school and stopped my side hustle. I incorporated my customization in my drawings. At first I was moved by the Shirt Kings artwork that I saw LL rocking, but the end of my Freshman year/Sophomore Year — that’s when I became truly inspired.
Up until my Freshman year, luxury to me was twill Lee jeans. Twill cost almost ten dollars more than regular jeans but for all the different color options…it was well worth it.
But as soon as Crack hit (the East Coast), Rappers began imitating their local drug dealers and Italian luxury brands became staples.
We inherited that obsession as we discussed here from watching music videos.
After seeing the “I Ain’t No Joke” video, Me & Sayyed Munajj searched far and wide, from the Tivoli to the Tabor Center to Tamarac Square in hopes of finding a Gucci pouch.
(Note: that pouch is only seen for two, maybe three seconds)
As 87 rolled into 88, we started seeing all types of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Fendi and MCM apparel. I’m talking jackets, hats, coats, pants, suits. Not only did we see this apparel in music videos, we saw it on album covers, and in the rare rap magazine features.
I know I’m not alone when I say that I thought that these companies made all of this apparel. Everything looked so well-made and official, how could it not be authentic? Right?
Wrong?
Dapper Dan got them Benjamin Button genes. I swear he looks younger today than he looked it in those old photos of him posed with all the Rappers of the first “Golden Era” of Rap.
He doesn’t look like a man who had his lucrative business crushed by licensing police and corporate lawyers. He must not be nostalgic, living in the past. He must not be a bitter man.
Especially considering the fact that Dapper Dan was almost 30 years ahead of his time…well…not really. But we’ll get to that.
Open 24 hours a day from 1983 to 1992, Dapper Dan ran a business like no other. His business was catered to his buyers whoever they might be. And there were different kinds of outfits. Some were the ever-popular luxury brand cuts while others were my favorites — the Rapper/athlete specific cut; I’m talking the Salt N Pepa, BDP jawns.
Those were the outfits that inspired me and made me long to have a set made for our crew.
While both quick, (bored) in-class drawings have customized outfits in the vein of Dapper Dan, the one to the left has my own shoe design, not so uncommon among many of us who drew or made characters.
That was the power of Dapper Dan, his clothing made countless young, Rap fans dream of being designers, creating the clothes and shoes that we wanted that no company would ever make.
Around the time Dapper Dan opened up his shop, Bronx Native, Sonia Sotomayer began work at Pavia and Harcourt with a concentration on intellectual property litigation — her focus — a Fendi anti-counterfeiting campaign. It was this campaign that led the future Supreme Court Judge to Dan’s 125th street haberdashery.
Together with Heather “Dragon Lady” McDonald, Sotomayer sought out counterfeit goods from Chinatown to Uptown. Sotomayer was famous for vesting up and going on raids and seizures with officers in support of The Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984 aka 18 U.S. Code § 2320.
According to Harper’s Bazaar, “Intellectual-property theft, the business of counterfeit and pirated goods, is an estimated $600-billion-a-year global industry that costs legitimate U.S. businesses up to $250 billion a year in lost revenue.”
And while they may have been true of the counterfeit purses and wallets in Chinatown, it hardly had anything to do with the work that was done by Dapper Dan up in Harlem. It wasn’t as if someone could get anything Dan made at Gucci’s 685 Fifth Avenue flagship store.
We like our clothes more royal-looking than the laid-back look of Gucci or Fendi. Their clothes are too bland. Dapper Dan
Nonetheless, the first raid took place in 1988. With guns drawn, officers and Sotomayer burst in Dan’s shop and confiscated the leather swaths that were used to make Dan’s creations. Dapper Dan reportedly refused to show in court and those items were destroyed.
After four years of raids, one of Sotomayer’s last acts as a private attorney before becoming a judge was her 1992 case against Dapper Dan which ultimately led to the closing of his Harlem store.
As corny and funny as The Ape” was, when I first saw the Supreme x Louis Vuitton collabo back in January, I wanted to summon him to the fashion show to threaten models on the runway and scare Vuitton designer, Kim Jones, out of the building.
But ‘The Ape’ was washed in one of the most comical, non-blow landing jumpings of all time and the fashion world went on to celebrate the Supreme/Vuitton collection as “surprising” and “exciting.”
All I could see was the hypocrisy.
Sure, Vuitton once hit Supreme with a cease and desist order back in 2000. And sure, Vuitton never sued Dapper Dan. So where is the hypocrisy you might ask?
For me, it’s a hypocrisy that’s pretty widespread and something that we discussed in “Negros Need Not Sample.”
When a young, paper thin white woman matches designer brands with popular sneakers, she’s celebrated for knowing “how a pair of Nike Airmaxes can be worn with a Céline coat and a Chanel bag.”
Something that Black women (Black American, Dominican, Puerto Rican) have been doing for DECADES, a style Andre Harrell dubbed “ghetto fabulous” and was popularized by Mary J Blige…who debuted in 1992.
I love that term, Columbusing, you know, when white folk recognize something that’s existed for eons and claim they discovered it.
Check out this statement:
Streetwear a couple of years ago, maybe even as recently as three or four years ago, was this thing that high fashion wouldn’t touch. Now, these two kind of disparate worlds are overlapping now more than ever. Lawrence Schlossman
Allow me to translate: Streetwear, as propagated and worn by niggers, a couple of years ago, was this THING (emphasis, my own) that high fashion wouldn’t touch. Now because young white girls and boys are taking on this look these two disparate worlds are overlapping more than ever.
Or check Dominic Chambrone, also known as the Shoe Surgeon. He’s celebrated for “remixing” and customizing shoes, often for star clients and I have yet to see any cases of him receiving cease and desist notices or copyright infringement suits.
Here’s one example of his work:
Hey…isn’t that Gucci?
When Chambrone ran into trouble with Pendleton he simply explained that he was doing one-offs…and they were “kind” enough to say that if he ever went into production that they would pursue legal action.
Wasn’t Dapper Dan’s entire business one-offs?
And that’s why seeing that Puma x Coogi propelled me into writing more than a Tweet.
Didn’t Lebron James JUST commission the Nike Bespoke’s Rocky Xu for these to be made:
I mean…a few months ago.
Now Puma’s mass producing the same damn look just on their iconic Clydes? They couldn’t even be original enough to use one of their modern shoes.
“Lebron customized the iconic A1, we’ll customize our iconic shoe, too.” Had to be Puma’s creative director thought.
In the world of Hip-Hop before it was hijacked by the rap industry, that kind of thing was an absolute Now Cipher. The culture was once— be original at all costs. That’s the mind that introduced the world to different brands and styles and sounds.
“Oh she’s rocking Prada? I’m gonna get with Chanel.”
“Everybody’s wearing Puma, Adidas, wait until I break out the Le Coq Sportif, the Diadora, the Lotto, etc.”
It’s bad enough that we’ve become a culture of imitators, that we don’t mind sounding exactly like the next man or woman. That sucks for the music. But what sucks more is now the fashion, television, & music industry has caught wind of this and learned how to monetize it.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if we were allowed to live in a world where we could be our natural, creative selves. Instead, our creativity is either mocked or worst, criminalized all the while what we do is celebrated when it’s done by white people.
And we think that shit is hot? And we throw them our hard earned cash? It don’t make no kinda country sense.
When skaters decided to voice their disgust with Supreme thinking that the company was pulling away from the original vision of anti-establishment. Supreme responded like this:
Throughout the history of the brand, we’ve seen our customers have apprehensions whenever we do something unexpected. However, we have always stayed true to the culture from which we came. Supreme
Skaters have it twisted. James Jebbia created his company in a world of PNB, Triple 5 Soul, Phat Farm, etc. Supreme was always Jebbia’s interpretation of that…that of course, is Black culture which began to be expressed in what was called Streetwear.
“The culture” that Jebbia’s talking about is the one that Marc Ecko’s made his fortune off of and is the same culture that’s been robbed since we were first abducted from our various countries.
So when people talk about Hip-Hop culture is “the only culture,” what they’re really talking about is Black American culture; a culture that we’ve always been ashamed to live, a culture that we now have fed back to us and sold at a premium price…and somehow, it’s supposed to be better now.
It’s not okay to me and I’m gonna talk about it as long as Allah Blesses me with fingers to type and a mouth to speak.
A taste of Dapper Dan’s work:
