We asked 13 voices in fashion, including stylists, designers, performers, and academics, to share their opinions on fashion’s appropriation of urban street style. What’s at stake when Miley kicks it in Jordans? When James Franco wears rows that riff on RiFF RAFF? When Brooke Candy is photographed by Terry Richardson with a gold tooth? When Hood By Air becomes a Style.com darling? Or when Rick Owens hires an American step team to model his Paris défilé? Should anybody be allowed to wear anything they want? Is fashion a post-racial utopia? What’s gained and what’s lost when fashion makes trendy looks that were born of a specific time, place, and people?
“‘Hip-hop culture’ has become 100 percent and without argument ‘pop culture,’ and that’s why …show more content…
The ways in which blackness is addressed and used as the basis for creative visions of the word mutates over time. For a long time, white men were allowed to take on black masculinity, which is where the concept of a ‘wigger’ comes from. Although there were moments of white women incorporating elements of black style into their looks, it wasn’t in the same way. There was no appropriation of larger ideas of dress, attitude, speech, etc. As we enter the second and third(plus) generations of white kids globally who have ideas of what it means to be white and align oneself with black culture, we’ve gotten to a unique moment where white women, white gay men, and other races are playing with blackness; its notions of coolness, hardness, urban-ness and specific forms of hyper-sexuality. Racism doesn’t exist less, but the merger of black cultural expression with any idea of authenticity or entitlement-to has faded as the internet archives and makes accessible any and every fetish desire, including the desire for or admiration of another culture.
I think everyone should be educated and maybe if that was emphasized more, we wouldn’t find ourselves trapped in cyclical conversations that ricochet between angry accusation and dismissive arrogance. READ. If you like black culture so much, try to understand it—it will make everything you do cooler and smarter. Otherwise… I guess you’re just a wigger.” –Juliana Huxtable, …show more content…
But what does seem new is that the stigma attached to rappers and their sometimes unwanted endorsements has faded. I wonder if this has more to do with with the marketing power of these musicians, now that fashion has become such a big business, than a genuine appreciation of their taste. One needs only to be reminded of those recent incidents of racial profiling—for instance, when two black youths were accosted by the police for legally and soundly buying fashion goods at a prestigious department store—to realize that any claim of ‘blackness’ being in fashion is based more on gimmicks and fads than any true solidarity or understanding of the black
“‘Hip-hop culture’ has become 100 percent and without argument ‘pop culture,’ and that’s why …show more content…
The ways in which blackness is addressed and used as the basis for creative visions of the word mutates over time. For a long time, white men were allowed to take on black masculinity, which is where the concept of a ‘wigger’ comes from. Although there were moments of white women incorporating elements of black style into their looks, it wasn’t in the same way. There was no appropriation of larger ideas of dress, attitude, speech, etc. As we enter the second and third(plus) generations of white kids globally who have ideas of what it means to be white and align oneself with black culture, we’ve gotten to a unique moment where white women, white gay men, and other races are playing with blackness; its notions of coolness, hardness, urban-ness and specific forms of hyper-sexuality. Racism doesn’t exist less, but the merger of black cultural expression with any idea of authenticity or entitlement-to has faded as the internet archives and makes accessible any and every fetish desire, including the desire for or admiration of another culture.
I think everyone should be educated and maybe if that was emphasized more, we wouldn’t find ourselves trapped in cyclical conversations that ricochet between angry accusation and dismissive arrogance. READ. If you like black culture so much, try to understand it—it will make everything you do cooler and smarter. Otherwise… I guess you’re just a wigger.” –Juliana Huxtable, …show more content…
But what does seem new is that the stigma attached to rappers and their sometimes unwanted endorsements has faded. I wonder if this has more to do with with the marketing power of these musicians, now that fashion has become such a big business, than a genuine appreciation of their taste. One needs only to be reminded of those recent incidents of racial profiling—for instance, when two black youths were accosted by the police for legally and soundly buying fashion goods at a prestigious department store—to realize that any claim of ‘blackness’ being in fashion is based more on gimmicks and fads than any true solidarity or understanding of the black