As a student and now a journalist of fashion, I am well-acquainted with its ebbs and flows; the way it moves through culture and the fact that everything old will be new again. Like bell-bottoms and graphic tees, fashion discourse also tends to get recycled. Oh boy, here comes another book and accompanying exhibit that glorifies punks and Mods!
Notoriously overlooked in academia yet, perhaps, the most important cultural movement in the past half-century is hip hop. It has evolved into not only a music genre but a way of life, complete with its own language, values and dress codes. Perhaps research is scarce here because it is so current and in flux, existing in a postmodern cut-up of coded vernacular and pop culture references fresh off the streets, rendering it too obscure and, at once, too material to place within a scholarly context. However, nothing encapsulates fads, current events – the general zeitgeist of the time – more than hip hop. The Beats had Ginsberg and Kerouac; are master lyricists like KRS-One or Rakim any less valid because their words are backed by a beat?
There is nothing better than 90s hip hop, fact. It has everything you could want: beats, melody, clever lyrics, catchy hooks. During my recent immersion into nothing-but-the-90s, my fashion-trained ears took notice of all the style references scattered throughout songs. And so I began to jot down those lyrics, Google them, find out their history. The Art of Easing – “sampled” from a Digable Planets song of the same name – was born.
I am sure this ground has been tread before, too. I see The Art of Easing as more of a personal mission to satisfy my own love of hip hop, fashion, writing and obsessive analysis. I am by no means an expert on rap music or streetwear, and that’s why I chose it. I am untangling this ball of yarn, making the links, weaving a story as I go.
By documenting clothing-related lyrics from songs and finding illustrative photos to go alongside them, I hope to piece together a different side of fashion history. But I want to go back to the beginning, before materialism became standard issue in rap songs. There is something innocent about pre-2000s hip hop, specifically the golden age. From gangsta rap to the more political fare, it did not seem to be so much about showing off the most expensive, ostentatious thing you could or couldn’t afford but what your neighbors were wearing, as if using dress to unite a community (and maybe hide a lil’ somethin’ somethin’). As if to say, “This is where I’m from.”
On that note, I leave you with this, from Nas:
No idea’s original; there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s never what you do, but how it’s done.
