What’s the quintessential Dapper Dan design? That would be the Louis Vuitton jackets that I made that, when you take ‘em off and reverse them, the other side is all mink. So let me find an angle that I can build on.” If they feel that good from a little Louis Vuitton pouch, imagine what they’d feel if I made them look like luggage?ĭapper Dan at his shop on 125th Street in 1989. I said: “Wow, this is just as important to them as the diamonds and the furs. Then when I saw people’s attachment to fashion symbols. Black people on the rise wanted furs and diamonds. In fashion, I also came up with technique nobody had: I saw the relationship between fur, diamonds and fashion symbols. The loophole in the law in my gambling was that I came up with technique nobody had. The hustlers when I was growing up, they always said, “Look for a hustle that has a loophole in the law.” The paper game had a loophole in the law. Is your work in the fashion world a hustle? Let me tell you something. In the book you talk about the time you spent hustling as a gambler and in what you called the “paper game”, 1 or credit-card fraud. That twist is not lost on Day “If you borrow, you have to make sure that everybody is involved,” said Day, the 74-year-old author of the new memoir, “Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem.” “When you tip the scales,” he continued, “that’s when it’s wrong. Gucci is the same company whose creative director, Alessandro Michele, drew charges of cultural appropriation in 2017 for designing a balloon-sleeved, fur-paneled bomber jacket he said was a “homage” to a similar product from Day’s 1980s-era work. (His use of those logos has drawn comparisons to the sampling going on in the music at the time.) Decades later, Day frequently collaborates with the same high-fashion world that once legally prosecuted him: with Gucci, for example, he recently collaborated on a mens-wear line and an atelier in Harlem. Day’s creations, which incorporated the logos of fashion houses like Fendi, Gucci and Louis Vuitton and which were quickly adopted by rap stars, have since become synonymous with the golden age of hip-hop. The fashion house won the battle, but Dapper Dan won the war. In 1992, Daniel Day was forced to close his legendary clothing boutique, Dapper Dan’s Boutique, after Fendi took legal action against what it argued was the streetwear designer’s trademark infringement for using the company’s logo in his creations.
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