I was just hanging out looking at some magazines at a local coffeeshop, something I don’t have the opportunity to do as often as I’d like these days, and took a quick glance at GQ. To be perfectly frank, I was totally blown away with what’s happening in upscale men’s fashions. The range of colors in spring fashion lines are incredible and they clued me in to the fact that the current attempt to take hip hop fashion lines upscale is deeply conservative without really being retro in an interesting way. In fact, if you compare the March issue of Vibe with the March issue of GQ, you’ll see just how incredibly boring the upscale hip hop lines are at a time when men’s upscale fashion lines outside of hip hop are looking fresh and innovative.

Even the more casual lines shown in Vibe have really obvious colors, when they’re being colorful, and the women’s wear just takes what’s already happening and adds little oddities or mixes and matches sleeves or whatever. Now I’m not knocking Vibe because they’re working with what they’ve got. But it confirmed my suspicions about hip hop’s upwardly mobile moves that don’t seem to be producing much of interest other than, “Look, Jay-Z’s wearing a suit!”

And I haven’t been seeing much of interest on the streets in the Latino community where I live and don’t ever get across the Bay to Oakland so I don’t know what’s happening for black folk’s street fashions over there. The club’s might be telling a different story but I wouldn’t know. I’ve been hoping that the upscale shifts in hip hop fashions would result in new approaches appearing on the block, not mimicking upscale moves but remixing or rejecting such moves and going in a new direction. But I’m not seeing that happening in SF.

It was also nice to discover how much can be communicated in a magazine that gets lost online. GQ’s official website communicates very little of the shifts in men’s fashion that one gets from the magazine, partly because this is a story told largely in the advertisements, as with any great fashion magazine. Plus, the quality of photographic reproduction of a mag like GQ is just much nicer than one gets on a computer screen. It makes me happy to know that magazines can communicate in such a strong way at a time when print media’s viability is increasingly in question. I’m also reminded that just looking at hip hop media is no way to understand hip hop business.

Am I offbase here? If you think that’s the case, please clue me in:
clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com