Has our culture gone irredeemably to pot
Good column by Noonan. Has this incident got legs, or is it a two week wonder? I suspect that it has legs. My take on the lack of criticism of Hip Hop/Rap, is that it has been due to a fear of being called a "Racist." Some of us went through criticism from our parents when R&R came in. But this time it has gone too far. It had to get to the point that it turned the stomach of the Left. There will be jokes at the Awards show this weekend about it, but also a changed atmosphere.
A radical change of appearence was going on in the Pop world before this incident. "Bling Bling" is out.
February 6, 2004 - NYT
In a Suit, Hip-Hop Grows Up and Buttons Down
By GUY TREBAY
Hip-hop has long been synonymous with jeans big enough to upholster a sofa, with throwback sports jerseys draped to the knees, with outrageously priced, limited-edition sneakers and with the diamond-barnacled hardware that has entered the vernacular as bling-bling.
But now the generation that made these trappings a perennially adolescent uniform is pushing 35. As fans mature and ascend the ranks in the work force, they find themselves looking for a new sartorial statement. Following the trends set by musical stars like Jay-Z, major hip-hop brands like Ecko and Sean John are ready with a simple proposition: the time has come for them to put on a suit.
During New York's Fashion Week, which begins today, Ecko will present a fall 2004 collection that largely dispenses with its trademark track suits and sneakers, and arranges its new image around that staple of Everyman's wardrobe, the blazer. On Sunday night at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, few fans of Pharrell Williams, who has been nominated for six awards, are likely to be shocked if he appears in one of the Perry Como-style sports jackets he wears so rakishly.
"This generation is getting older," said Wyclef Jean, 34, the founder of the Fugees. "When you mature, you realize that it's fine to wear your comfortable throwback jersey in the studio, but when you go out with your girl in a restaurant, you want to look clean-cut and mature."
Designers at a number of urban wear labels share that opinion, and while consumers have yet to respond in large numbers, manufacturers are staking a healthy proportion of their future business on the prospect that hip-hop will want to turn in its oversized baseball caps and sweatpants and get suited up. "I hate the word, but the consumer has matured," said Jeffy Tweedy, the chief executive of Sean John, a label known for its high-end jeans and costly sweatclothes, but which stumbled upon a bonanza when it sold 200,000 striped shirts with French cuffs in the 2003.
"Blazers and wovens are going to be a major part of our business now," Mr. Tweedy said. "You can tell the consumer is ready if you go to the lounges and hipper clubs in New York City and around America and they all have signs at the door saying 'Dress to Impress' or 'No Athletic Gear Allowed.' "
Hip-hop is "becoming more Wall Street," said Tiffany Reid, 21, an employee at H272, a store on Lafayette Street owned by the hip-hop artist DJ Honda that is a certified pipeline for street fashion's early adopters. Ms. Reid's colleague, Johanna Barnes, agreed. "I notice a lot of guys who come in and want button-down shirts with stripes like Jay-Z wore in a video," Ms. Barnes added. "A lot of rappers now aren't as much street as they used to be.
Last November when "The Black Album" by Jay-Z was released, the rapper made the point succinctly. "And I don't wear jerseys, I'm 30-plus," Jay-Z rapped. "Give me a crisp pair of jeans," he intoned. "Button up." As early as last August, he signaled a shift in his sartorial direction by wearing a jacket with well-defined shoulders and rear vents to the MTV Video Music Awards.
Jerseys, whether the vintage-inspired throwbacks or those celebrating sports stars of our day, "are over" according to John Moore, the fashion director of Vibe, whose February issue features an eight page pictorial devoted to young men wearing suits. "This ain't your daddy's suit," a caption reads, and, while the high-end "kicks," or sneakers, and gangster do-rags worn by Vibe's models would not have cut it at the water coolers of an earlier era, chalk-stripes and superfine woolens from Hugo Boss and Dior Homme were classic Wall Street garb.
"The whole bling-bling thing has left," Mr. Moore said, a change attributable perhaps to general shifts in taste and just as inevitably to workplace requirements that have seen employers seek to distance themselves from casual attire. "Education-wise and workwise, people of color and African-Americans are a force," he added. "They're sophisticated consumers, and they increasingly want to be taken seriously."
Most market analysts point out that it has been some time since the hip-hop market was predominantly African-American. "The hip-hop generation is demographically broad-based," said Marshal Cohen, the senior analyst at the NPD Group, a market research company. "What's happening is that the designer market is not driving the business anymore. Consumers and celebrities are.
"You have this age group from 25 to 34 that grew up with the music and is now migrating away from the hip-hop lifestyle and getting more conventional. At the same time, they're bringing the lessons of casual hip-hop dressing forward so they wear the suit in a way that says they're willing to be part of the establishment but not necessarily to conform."
Customers at the leading edge of the trend are eager to dress up, said Lenny Rothschild, who operates 10 men's haberdasheries in the Midwest.
"They have money, they've outgrown labels and branding, they understand what style and fashion is all about," he said. "They're hugely influenced by Jay-Z, and they don't want jerseys anymore."
What they want, Mr. Rothschild said, is shirts with barrel cuffs and point collars: "I've gone through 500 of them this month."
Yesterday afternoon at Bergdorf Goodman's new Thom Browne boutique, a music celebrity came in wearing a XXXL-size jersey and jeans that were "falling off his rear end," said Robert Burke, the store's fashion director.
The celebrity promptly headed for Mr. Browne's retro classic suits, and he bought a $2,200 linen tuxedo with the ribbon stripe on the trousers, high armholes and a lean silhouette to wear at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night.
When Marc Ecko recently decided to realign his brand's future, it was to accommodate his sense that new dress codes are required for a maturing generation.
"The average kid - black, white, it doesn't matter - is urban-minded now," said Mr. Ecko, the founder of a clothing company best known for voluminous sweatshirts with a rhinoceros logo that seem ubiquitous along city streets. "He's going into the workplace, and he's bringing that information and that approach to the classics."
Mr. Ecko added: "There's this group whose fashion sense has been born from sports culture and not traditional haberdashery. When they see a blazer it says, 'wear me differently.' "
For most of the past decade, hip-hop credibility was linked to looking "street," a notion interpreted through styles that made reference to gang life (colored bandannas), the jailhouse (beltless jeans worn with one leg rolled) and subcultures in which the markers of cool were enmeshed in drug running and other activities as illicit as they were perversely glamorous.
Musicians set the trends then - and still do - a fact that designers are hoping can revive earnings in the flagging $55 billion men's wear industry. At last month's men's wear runway shows for fall 2004 in Milan, designers like Dolce & Gabbana outlined their ambitions in this regard.
"Musicians set the trends, and a man in the 25- to 30-year-old generation is very sensitive to what musicians wear," said Gabriella Forte, the president of United States operations for Dolce & Gabbana, which built its show around a kind of high/low dressing that paired cargo trousers with suit jackets whose abbreviated skirts and trim silhouettes seemed overtly pitched at the tastes of just such a customer.
"The suit was a constricting uniform for someone who is 50 now, something he couldn't wait to get out of," Ms. Forte said. For a cohort that grew up in hooded shirts and Air Jordans, however, the suit has an enticing novelty.
"When Pharrell Williams wears a jacket it's not a uniform," Ms. Forte said. "He's making it his fashion attire."
At the Triple Five Soul shop on Lafayette Street yesterday employees said that they had already sold out their stock of 80-odd pinstriped and camouflage suits, which range in price from $80 to $160, in just two months. The blue pinstriped suits bore on their jacket backs the motto Fresh Dressed Like a Million Bucks.
Wearing a Run-D.M.C. T-shirt, a blue hooded jacket and baggy jeans, A. Frog, 28, a D.J. from Glendale, Queens, considered himself a holdout against the inevitable change. "I'm still more partial to the old-school style," he explained.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
