Now, as the musical genre that became much bigger than artists and albums turns 50, hip-hop’s longstanding influence on fashion is clear — but what’s at times still fuzzy is the female influence. This Juneteenth, WWD celebrates their stories.
“I reverse engineered into fashion because of my love for hip-hop. It was the soundtrack of my life at the time,” said Walker, who’s regarded as the first woman, and among the pioneers, in what’s now known as
Before long, after popping in at Dapper Dan’s and thanks to her Fashion in Effect customer base who knew what they wanted from style, Walker Wear was born. “We wanted to carry that spirit but I wanted to represent and talk about it,” she said. “So it really started with airbrushing and using fashion as canvases with acrylic art and different things like that. Then we would custom make anything from velour sweatsuits, raw denim and then our basic fleece.
she said. “Guru moved across the hall from me when he first came from Boston to New York so he was my actual neighbor, I gave his first demo to my dad and that’s how I started working with Gang Starr, once him and [DJ] Premier got together. It was like Easy Mo Bee lived next door to me, he was in the next building.
She skipped doing interviews and opted for product placements with musician and DJ Jam Master Jay, rappers like Treach and Method Man and groups like Naughty by Nature. At Fubu, perhaps the most notable of the O.G. streetwear brands, even though entrepreneur and designer J. Alexander Martin and cofounders Daymond John, Keith Perrin and Carl Brown were at the helm when the label launched in 1992, Kianga “Kiki Kitty” Milele, was the head designer at the brand for seven years at its height.A WWD article from June 8, 2000,
“We were influenced very much by music and very much by some of our artists at the time and contemporaries. But Baby Phat was very much setting the tone there because it’s breaking away from the men’s establishment,” said Lee Simmons, who also appears in “50 Years Fly.” “It was trying to turn it in a different direction, and trying to celebrate the sexiness and the femininity of a woman.”
“In a lot of ways, women are overlooked and pushed to the side and you have to play a part, you have a role, and it’s very often suppressed. And I’m not trying to sound in any kind of way begrudging, I’m just stating what it is,” Lee Simmons said. “We’ve come so far as women of color in fashion, but obviously we still have so far to go.
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