how alternative music starts street fashions that annoy us
What’s up with this boxers-baring saggy-pants thing? And why does the trend so infuriate people? Is it the prudish taboo of modesty - are we are shocked to see more than a waistband of underwear – and actual curves of the male derriére? Is it the impracticality of these young men strutting down the street with their hands on their pants so they won’t fall off? Or is it the swagger and air of irresponsibility?
There is a push by lawmakers – particularly in the south - regarding this style, which is seen as setting a poor civic image. What happens when fashion moves from being objectionable to being illegal? Are we solving the problem, or are we trying to rid ourselves of a visible manifestation of what the real issue is? They are not new concerns – either the uproar over new street fashions or the way that styles of young people have infuriated the masses and conjured horror in the minds of polite society - determined that the new fashions can only lead to juvenile delinquency.
If we take a look back, even just for a few generations - we’ll see that this is how almost all iconic fashions are started. Think of the most typical depiction you can of any decade… You’d wear a zoot suit in the 1940’s, a leather jacket and blue jeans in the 1950’s. You’d be a hippie in the 70’s and a punk in the 80’s, and if we’re far enough away to remember the 90’s you’d probably look like Kurt Cobain. Every one of these styles ended up in mainstream fashion – every price point and market from high school kids to high-end designers to Middle America malls. Those styles are now the archetypes for their decade, and every one of them came from the street. They started as rebellion – with young people from poor economic backgrounds with insurrection on their minds.
Zoot suits came out of Harlem Jazz Clubs in the 1940’s and quickly took hold in the African American population. The country was listening to Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Benny Goodman – mostly at segregated clubs where non-whites were not admitted, despite the fact that most of the musicians were black. Born of Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean cultures, big band swing expanded to include Latino musicians like Lalo Guerrero and Don Tosti, who incorporated boogie-woogie with rhumba rythyms. Caló (the Spanish jargon of young immigrants, often used in pachuco swing) used rhyming slang, much like African American jive, and is where the term “zoot suit” was born. Zoot suits were comprised of knee-length suit jackets, often double breasted, with wide lapels and heavily padded shoulders. The extremely wide-legged trousers had cuffs so narrow at the ankles you had to use a shoe horn to get them over your feet.
The offensiveness of their baggy clothing wasn’t just because the fashion police thought they looked dumb – after 1942 they were actually illegal. Once America entered WWII, the War Rationing board passed laws about virtually every aspect of fashion – including how many yards of fabric could be used to make a suit, as every extra scrap of wool was intended for soldier’s uniforms. To mainstream Americans, young black and Latino kids wearing the oversized suits was an un-patriotic slap in the face.
Zoot-suiters were mostly poor, inner-city, second-generation children of manual laborers. They had rejected the “American Dream” chased by their parents, but were alienated by the same blatantly racist society that herded Japanese and German American citizens into internment camps. A potent component of fashion is its ability to project an image of its wearer constantly; it lets you claim allegiance to – or rejection of - a group without having to say a word. The zoot suits claimed an illegal, offensive, even violent allegiance to their proto-gang culture; it was a deliberate and public way of flouting the law. The “Zoot Suit Riots” of 1942 were proof of their power, as thousands of sailors on leave in Los Angeles attacked, stripped, and beat anyone seen wearing these baggy suits…or at least the suits were the initiation; like the Rodney King Riots 50 years later, it quickly became an excuse for indiscriminant and widespread racial violence.
What strikes me about the photos from the Zoot Suit Riots is how young they all were. These were not hardened gangsters - these were young kids embracing a counter-culture look – a uniform as a symbol of rebellion. Octavio Paz called them “a symbol of love and joy, of horror and loathing, an embodiment of liberty, of disorder, of the forbidden”.
Rock’n’roll was the next musically-driven form of social rebellion for teenagers. Made sexy by Marlon Brando and James Dean, the “greaser” look of working-class blue jeans and white t-shirts became ubiquitous for the 50’s brand new “teenage” culture. The “bad boys” originally came from low economic standing, and their working class backgrounds were exactly what offended the mainstream. Their cotton twill work trousers or 501’s and rolled-up sleeves made them look like mechanics in a sea of pearls and sweater sets. When blue jeans were adapted by the fashion industry and marketed to teenagers, parents and school boards around the country erupted, fearing that this symbol of cowboys and gold miners would lead their delicate children to lives of juvenile delinquency. Street fashions have always been about liberating people out of their circumstances – taking ownership of the very things that could be used to keep you down. This aggressive stance can bring power and hope to those afraid that luck and privilege are the only means of making an impact on the world.
On the surface, Rock was about sex and fast cars and the awakening of young American culture, which was bad enough, but it was also based on boogie-woogie blues rhythms and found offensive by mainstream American culture for being “black music”. This was part of the appeal of Elvis Presley – mainstream radio finally had a white face to go along with popular tunes.
As the Vietnam war progressed into the 1960’s, the new “Un-American” was a war protester. Symbolized by their un-soldier-like long hair and beards, the hippies pushed boundaries with their non-violent sit-ins and transcendental meditation. They looked offensive too, with their impractical bell-bottomed jeans and DIY patchwork. Embroidery has always been a status-flaunting symbol of impracticality – it was all the rage with the satin-clad aristocracy in the courts of Louis XIV, XV and XVI – but after the turn into the 1800’s the world suddenly became wary of men who displayed any signs of overt impracticality. Once a marker of wealth and leisure, it suddenly implied an emasculating deviation from acceptable social standards. Unnecessary patches on pants, floral embroidery on denim shirts, velvet panels inserted into the legs of their hip-hugger blue jeans – all of these things represented a feminized regression from the hypermasculinity of good red-blooded American soldiers, and people found this emasculation terrifying.
Hippies embraced frightening new concepts like Eastern Philosophy and health food. They were pro-racial-integration, pro-sex, pro-drugs, anti-makeup, anti-bras, and anti-war. They wore gender-neutral clothing with ethnic influences like dashikis and ponchos. Their fashions projected a distancing from “straight” or “square” society and declared their willingness to question authority. High on LSD and strumming to the tunes of Dylan and Led Zeppelin and The Byrds, Hippies were desperately seeking connections – with each other through free love; with their physical surroundings through drug experimentation; with the world at large. “How does it feel / to be without a home / like a complete unknown / like a rolling stone”. Their fear of apathy drew them to sensual and home-grown pleasures: sex and drugs, bright colors and velvety textures, flowers and smiley faces. The arts-and-crafts of tie-dye, macramé, and embroidery had them interacting with their clothing in a sensory-heavy way.
The whole world recognizes punk fashion as black clothing with band patches, splattered with paint and held together with safety pins. Leather jackets, combat boots, multiple piercings and crazy colored hair spiked into mohawks complete the look. The importance of this style (pre-Hot Topic) was its DIY credibility: anybody could attain it in their own bathroom with just a trip to the hardware store. The whole point was to make your own look – and if it pissed people off, so much the better. The music they listened to was The Clash and The Ramones and the New York Dolls and Black Flag and the Sex Pistols: it was loud and it was about misery and death, because that was what could shake you out of your apathy.
The original roots of Punk were in impoverished, working-class inner-cities in Britain and America. Britain was in a recession, and Thatcher-ism and Reaganomics were both conservative backlashes to the free-love hippie culture of the previous decade. Teenagers as a social class had only been recognized for the past few decades, and their lack of a voice in society led to feelings of frustration, boredom and the quest for an outlet for their anger. Punk culture quickly took hold in more affluent suburbs as well, where teenagers felt stifled by complacent affluence. Disillusioned with government and protesting the dominant role of big business, punk kids were pessimistic about their future, and angry music and rebellious fashion was a way for these outcasts to come together.
Less aggressive than punk, Grunge was still about social alienation, apathy, and a desire for freedom. Kids felt confined by “the establishment” and were disenchanted with society and depressed about their future. The rebellion of the jaded 90’s was more about opting out than aggressively challenging stereotypes. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains all came out of Seattle, and the grunge uniform followed in that style, with practical, outdoorsy clothing and thrift store chic. Grunge rockers took none of the antagonistic artistic license of punks – this look was cheap but durable and its invisibility ran counter to the flashy “look at me” aesthetic of the 1980’s. Nothing was customized or tailored – it was just unkempt and sloppy. Plaid flannels, thermal undershirts, ripped blue jeans and work boots were the grunge uniform, as were scruffy beards, greasy hair and morning-after makeup. The goal was to look like you didn’t care.
The fashion for wearing jeans slung low around the hips started in prisons, where belts and shoelaces are taken away from convicts to avoid suicides by hanging. The toughness that prison life projected quickly made its way into the streets through untied sneakers and low-slung pants. This was intensified by the poverty-class tendency of young men to wear the hand-me-downs of their older siblings. If your pants were too big, it meant you had a large older brother who could kick somebody’s ass. Like all rebellious fashion, there is never just one reason it takes hold – it has to resonate on a number of levels for it to reach the tipping point where it turns into a wide-spread trend. Along with the dangerousness of prison references, many young black men were tired of off-the-rack clothing being tailored to a different body type. Jeans in particular are cut with attention to the rear end (isn’t that what we all check out in the mirror when trying on new jeans?). Until the more curvy-friendly brands like Apple Bottoms and Baby Phat came along, many young African American men were forced to wear too-large sizes that were cut for (as I’ve been told) “skinny, ass-less white boys”. As a costume designer, I will attest to the impossibility of finding a good pair of men’s jeans that fits slim through the hips and legs but that can curve around a little junk in the trunk. By wearing their jeans low enough to emphasize their non-European-standard bodies, these men were refusing to conform to a societal standard that held subliminal racism, and blatantly – if not aggressively – flaunt their differences.
Born in poverty-stricken South Bronx, Hip-hop culture was MCing, DJ-ing, and breakdancing. Derived from folk poets of West Africa, Rap was lyrical, boastful poetry, rhymed alone or over music or beatboxing. This music and culture was a direct and artistically obvious way to seize freedom from oppressive social conditions and negotiate an identity; to claim an emblem of ethnicity in a social order that had spectacularly failed to contain their energy and differences. Like other trends that start low and reach high fashion, the once DIY nature of rap and hip-hop also birthed an industry, and now rap artists like Jay-Z, Naz, 50 Cent, Eminem and Lil Wayne are mega-stars, and hip-hop influences are all over fashion runways.
Like all rebellious sub-cultures, it took 10-20 years on the street before it reached the mainstream, and found a style to crystalize its existence. By then, hip-hop had been married to its association with baggy pants, work boots and oversized logos. Many of the design elements still came out of prison culture – skull and skeleton decorations, tattoo- and graffiti- inspired design motifs – and were joined by the clear status symbols of wealth-flaunting, suddenly-rich drug dealers: diamond earrings, large ornamental belt buckles, and snow- and ski- inspired puffy coats and fur coats.
****
Every one of these groups has been referred to in their own times as juvenile delinquents and threats to social decency. They were made up primarily of young men disheartened with society – the same society who viewed them as anarchists bent on corrupting the morals of the nation. Teenage frustrations may come out in poorly focused anger and unfathomable fashion sense, but they’re often making genuine critiques of government and society. Young people have always acted out against apathy and the impression of being unwanted outcasts. The themes of disillusionment are usually rooted in racism and poverty – the recipe for rebellion throughout history.
When I was a teenager, I never found a musical genre that I felt spoke for me, but I certainly took advantage of fashion’s ability to express frustration with what I felt were society’s shortcomings. When I dyed my hair green and wore combat boots and chains and a biker jacket and shaved my head - I was telling people that I was pissed off. I was expressing – in the only language that seemed accessible – that I wasn’t pleased with the future that I felt was being offered to me. It was my rejection of what I believed society wanted me to look like or sound like or be like. In fashion, I had a voice.
Perhaps teenagers have much to teach us about the ways our society isn’t functioning, and since fashion is an important visual message system, maybe we should pay more attention to the trends that piss us off the most. It will remind us of the dangers of being absorbed into the establishment, and keep us from getting complacent and self-satisfied. When I see teenagers today with green hair and spikes in their nose and impractical clothing, I can’t help but pity them with an irritating older-than-thou sigh, and an air of “you’ll get over this some day, just like I did”. But to those teenagers, I also make this promise: I will remember your rage. I will try to see through your stupid clothes and recognize that you are like I was: declaring your distinct voice, raging against injustice and inequality and desperately insisting on being heard.
But of course! I say. The Fashions for Battle have remain
fairly unchanged, season to season, for roughly 5,000 years, if not ten times
as long. (For recent history, see this database with the history of NFL uniforms since the 1920's. For contemporary fashion, see this Fox news reports on Nike's new look for NFL uniforms)
