Dialogues@RU - Volume Two, Spring 2003

Today, hip-hop's stimulus as a profitable musical genre correlates to its major dividends as a viable fashionable style. However, before its recent ascendance, hip-hop's acceptance into mainstream culture was hardly a walk in the park. Often negatively stereotyped and badly portrayed in the media, hip-hop culture rarely received any notoriety as a fashionable trend. In fact, contemporary America's standard opinion, especially during the early 90s, was that hip-hop fashion was an intimidating style of dress and correlated to violence. According to Jeffrey McKinney's article " From Rags to Riches," the stereotypes of Middle America relegated hip-hop artists and the aspiring fashion gurus of urban society as pariahs of the industry, providing them with little opportunity to spread their wings:

A decade ago, hip-hop artists were decked out in Timberland footwear or Tommy Hilfiger apparel, rapping about these brands in their lyrics. Just a few years ago, hip-hop entrepreneurs who produced their own lines were either shut out of major fashion shows or relegated to urban apparel ghettos within department stores. (98)

According to Leslie L. Royal's "Hip-Hop on Top ," those impressions have began to subside, and hip-hop's allure today lies in the fact that it was an anomaly, allowing it to become a fixture in the fashion circuits of modern style. With its influence so gargantuan and the fact that "baggy, brightly colored Hip-Hop clothes have gone mainstream in American youth fashion and the result has brought small fortunes to a cadre of black designers," the embrace of urban fashion has become evident and gradual, opening the door for rapper-created brands such as Rocawear and Sean John to not only conquer urban outlets, but also for hip-hop fanatics to integrate urban flavor with existing trends, therefore spawning such concoctions as customized footwear (Royal 91-4).

In many ways, western culture's reluctance as well as its equally balanced fear and naiveté to accept hip-hop as a partner rather than a subordinate has allowed hip-hop to create its own autonomy as well as its own consumer following. Customized footwear, which involves the use of such upper-echelon brands such as Gucci (Figure 1), is in a way a subtle rebellion by the hip-hop community against the brands that subordinated it. In an almost coercive way, the culture has ushered itself into the realms of these luxury brands by integrating them into their culture. According to John L. Roberts's " Rap of Luxury ," artists of the genre, who normally come from the ghetto environments that high-class brands have detested, have used their lyrics to convey their relentless pursuit to be in the same breath of social elite:

Though rappers have long found inspiration for lyrics in brand names like Adidas and Tanqueray, it's the prestige logos that sparkle the brightest. Stars like Busta, P. Diddy, Ja Rule and Jay-Z have expensive tastes and have made themselves powerful pitchmen, lifting the aspirations of youth culture for life's finer things while spiking sales of the Cadillac Escalade, Bentley, Cristal champagne, Burberry, Prada and Louis Vuitton. (1)

Directly or indirectly, these expensive tastes and fetishes in hip-hop tunes have become social signifiers. Though on the surface they appear to be blatant advertisements, they are also a screaming representation of rapper braggadocio, the visual representation of rags to riches, the equivalent of a status jump from the pedestrian purchases of Reeboks to the boisterous splurges of Chanel sandals. For the consumer, these elite brands offer temptation, desire, and jaded models of inspiration for ghetto youths who know no better and are easily persuaded. The brands purvey a capitalistic seduction that preys on the materialistic mind of an adolescent culture that can only afford to mimic the pocket-heavy and platinum-selling artists they look upon as their musical idols, who are, in turn, using the brands to accomplish their own societal leaps. The integration of Timberland boots (Figure 2) and Nike Air Force 1's (Figure 3), two hip-hop staples, which are often the most popular shoes to customize, is "personalization" at its finest, merging street culture with high fashion. The shoes, which can be ordered online through such websites as customgucci.com or custom made at repair stores for between $100 and $300, are not necessarily a rarity, but scarce for the average consumer (Maxwell 1). Mostly championed by hip-hop enthusiasts and passionate youths, customized footwear in hip-hop is virtually free marketing for elite brands. However, contrary to belief, this gratuitous promotion does not generate cohesion, but tension and a paradox between two separate spectrums of society. Though the decadent practices of youth and consumer culture, which purchase or use "counterfeit" fabric and imitation monograms to create customized footwear, perpetuate the implicit expressiveness of artistic originality that hip-hop embodies, this expressive originality is contradicted by the idea that these methods expose a sense of tastelessness and a prostitution of brand names. A website like customgucci.com is one of a plethora of Internet forums that replicate monograms onto footwear and sell customized urban apparel. On its home page, the site has a disclaimer clearly stating that it is " is in no way affiliated with Burberry, Coach, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Manolo Blahnik, or Timberland," which suggests that the products are replicas and that these primary designers are, unfairly, never compensated. This advocating of bootleg or replicated goods, which has always been a sign of consumer sovereignty since the days of prohibition and black-marketing, has always meant a short end, profit-wise, for the companies directly affiliated with the product. By reinventing these brands in an approach far removed from the intended vision hierarchy labels have for their emblems, urban society exposes an injustice and the natural human condition to find the best deal. However, it also simultaneously depicts a gesture towards conformity between social extremes, where dissemination, no matter what the means in a trendy and material world, creates a ripple effect in an easily dispersing pop culture.