In Jailhouse Chic, an Anti-Style Turns Into a Style Itself
By Guy Trebay
Gangster swank has always been with us, from the George Raft and Jimmy Cagney era through the Rat Pack and "Goodfellas" years. You can see it still in the dark shirts and ties of Regis Philbin's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" wardrobe, which might as well have been pinched from the closet of Tommaso Buscetta, a Sicilian Mafioso who inspired a men's wear collection by Dolce & Gabbana. Until a decade back, a gangster was a guy who suited up for business. For fashion purposes, at least, he was probably of European ancestry and white.
Then, as new mobs began coming to power, they brought with them different modes of self-identification. The peaked lapels and sharkskin suits of Hollywood hoodlums were supplanted by the superbaggy jeans and gang colors of the 'hood. As urban fashion tracked the influence of street gangs, it also occasionally went deeper inside criminal culture for its inspiration. It looked beyond the streets to jail.
Incarceration chic is everywhere lately, in the orange jumpsuits worn by the staff at the hip Chelsea nightclub Centro Fly (nearly identical to models wholesaled to penitentiaries) and the jailhouse denims worn by the rapper Master P on the cover of The Source, a hip-hop magazine, for June. It is also in the county-lockup look of kids at Brooklyn's Fulton Mall, who sport generic blue or green uniform trousers, white sleeveless T-shirts and gang bandannas.
Explaining the look, Cadi Agueros, a stylist for Vibe magazine, said: "The rawest street element is a jail element, so the strongest statement is a uniform with shirts and trousers that match perfectly, like a jail piece. It's like saying: 'I don't need Girbaud or Mecca. I can get a Fruit of the Loom three-pack of T-shirts for $7.' "
Insiders can detect the sway of gang and prison culture on the iconography of seemingly innocuous brands. One popular line of sports jerseys features the Yankees logo against a red background. Another, produced by the urban wear label Fubu, highlights the numerals 05. "You wouldn't necessarily think anything of it," explained Lt. Kevin Yorke, a police officer assigned to street gang investigations in Brooklyn. "Except that the Yankees don't wear red."
It is however, the color of the Bloods, a gang whose local membership is estimated by the Corrections Department at 2,000. And 05 is, for Bloods, a number freighted with symbolism. Yet, Lieutenant Yorke emphasized, "just because you're wearing them doesn't mean you're part of a gang."
And Daymond John, chief executive of Fubu, insists that the iconographic overlap is little more than coincidence. "If we limited our designs" based on potential hidden meanings, he said, "we'd pretty much be making plain yellow clothes."
The sway of street style may be the best preserved of fashion secrets, exerting influence on everything from haute couture to the unstoppable urban-wear juggernaut. It has turned up in the form of denim B-boy ball gowns on Jean-Paul Gaultier's runway. It is the force behind the voluminous low-hanging baggy, which was said to be inspired by the fact that inmates rarely get to keep their belts. You can spot it in fads for sneakers without laces, jeans with one cuff rolled up and, lately, in the widespread adoption of ironed gang bandannas, or flags.
The most recent wave of thug-style dressing "is coming about in a weird way," said Duane Pyous, associate photo editor of Vibe. "Hip-hop covered this area before," he continued, "but the kids on the street are into it again." Partly, he added, this is in response to the music's mainstreaming, an attempt to restore street energy to a genre sometimes accused of growing flabby. And partly it is a reaction to the ostentation of stars like Lil' Kim, who are accused of forgetting their roots and of starting to preen or "floss."
"That 'Sean Puffy Combs flossing in a white fur coat' look is not that interesting," Mr. Pyous said. "The jailhouse look is back because it's about rawness, hardness and credibility."
It's also, perhaps, about the fact that the United States now jails more people than any other country in the world. It becomes increasingly difficult to conceive of jails as institutions outside society when you consider that the number of incarcerated Americans approaches the combined populations of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.
"Let's face it, there's a lot of incarcerated people in the United States, and a lot of those are young people," said Alphonse McCullough, a senior editor at The Source. "Those people come out of jail, and they take a part of that culture with them. Folks I've known who were locked up get released with their prison gear on, so they keep it. Folks in L.A. have been wearing county blues for a long, long time."
Well before the Gap reinstated khakis, they were the uniform of Los Angeles's Chicano gangs, who wore their jail-issued trousers as a badge of pride. "Fashion is always coming back to the boulevard for inspiration," Mr. McCullough said. "This time around, it's getting a little grittier and taking it to the prison yard."
It will come as a surprise to many, no doubt, that the prison yard could have connotations of glamour. For that matter, it would have been hard to foresee a vogue for "wife beaters," as Stanley Kowalski-style tank tops are called on the street, worn both as shirts and head scarfs; for Hanes T-shirts as must-haves; or for tight nylon do-rags and bandannas manufactured even by Tommy Hilfiger, the mass-market designer, who jumped the trend by introducing a line of logo skullcaps two years back.
"The prison look is a backlash against these urban labels," said Kevin Burrus, a New Jersey-based party promoter who dresses "thug style," as he stood on 125th Street last week. "Back in the day, Gucci and Calvin Klein were what it was all about. You had status on your behind. Now, it's Sean Puffy Combs charging you $75 for a pair of jeans. And I say to the label freaks: 'Those people whose names you're wearing have pool filters. You understand? And you don't even have a pool!' So when you put on the headpiece, the handkerchief, the do-rag, it's a look that's defying all that."
The allure of jail-style apparel is strong enough even for prisons themselves to get into the business. Prison Blues, with 30,000 units sold a year, is hardly a major retail force. Yet, under its parent authority, the Oregon Corrections Department, the corporation operates www.prisonblues.com, a thriving Web site, which sells to West Coast chains like Wilco and recently found its inmate-made denims on the hot e-commerce children's site Katrillion.
"We play the cachet of being prison-manufactured two ways," John Borchert, the operations director for Prison Blues, said from Portland. "It's a strong sales point in the fashion market. In the work-wear market we just say, 'U.S. Made.' "
The demand for prison-style work clothes has helped sales tremendously, said Mark Ross, Prison Blues' marketing director. "Our customer base used to be 95 percent work wear, but in the last six months alone, our business has shifted to 15 percent fashion accounts," he added.
PNB Nation, an urban-wear subsidiary of Perry Ellis, with annual revenues of $20 million, has produced a runway show full of jailhouse looks, including denims that resemble prison-yard suits and T-shirts with fake docket numbers on the front.
In New York high schools, where so much urban fashion is incubated, street authenticity occasionally runs into the city's "zero tolerance policy," said Patricia Kobetts, deputy superintendent of Brooklyn high schools. "When youngsters come in, they are told clearly what is appropriate, which excludes anything disruptive," like supposed gang jackets or colors or clothes suggestive of criminal affiliation.
Still, when Shara McHayle-Grinage, the vice president for marketing of PNB Nation, was growing up in the O'Dwyer Gardens projects in Coney Island in the 1970's, it was exactly these clothes that signified cool. "The older guys, regardless of whether they were drug dealers or whatever for real, looked so sexy in their do-rags, their wife beaters, their army pants and no-label look," Ms. McHayle-Grinage said. Reinterpreting hoodlum style as fashion, she said, is simply a way of riffing on stereotypes.
"It was a hot look then, and it's still hot," she said. "I wear those clothes myself, and my friends say, 'You look like a thug, with your pants hanging off your waist and your Timberlands and your gang bandannas.' So what? I'm no thug. I just feel sexy in the clothes. It brings me back to the 'hood and to a time when I was a kid, and that was the look of the ghetto superstars."
[end]
Carl
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