Fashioning Hip Hop

Fashion in hip hop has received limited attention from fashion theorists, historians and educators (Turman 2023), despite hip hop’s position as a global phenomenon and its celebration in several fashion exhibitions (see Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: 50 Years of Hip Hop Style at The Museum at FIT (2023). Responding to how ‘Hip Hop offers the Hip Hoppa a space free from colonial logics.’ (Ortiz, 2021, p.1), this presentation reflects on a decolonial fashion course taught at undergraduate level at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, UK in which students created zines that explored an issue in fashion using hip hop approaches. Using hip hop pedagogies, the course taught hip hop’s political and radical dress codes, especially anti anti-Blackness, feminist and queer dress. Hip hop’s global expansion from baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts has resulted in both problematic appropriation and collaboration with luxury fashion including US brands Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger and European fashion houses of Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. For fashion education, there is a pressing need to show the value of marginalised Black, global majority and working class fashion histories and further the project to decolonise and de-link fashion from racial capitalism, hip hop provides the tools to creatively do this.