How Hip Hop Came, Saw, and Conquered High Fashion

If you’re like Aves and I, then the past month or so has consisted of mood boards and being glued to our phones, awaiting social media to flood us with Fashion Week content. Starting with the highly anticipated New York Fashion Week, followed by London, Milan, and Paris weeks, it’s been collection on collection (not that we’re complaining! Keep em’ coming… I mean, did you guys catch the Balmain line? FLAWLESS!). If you want our take on the fashion weeks, hit up QFin and check out our blog posts by our business and marketing teams. Nice little ‘inspo’ for the upcoming seasons.

Anyways, I digress. The real reason we’re here is because we are completely awestruck by how rapidly the high fashion market has been changing, particularly in terms of its newfound dependency on popular culture. Take a minute to check out recently established fashion labels such as FentyxPuma and Yeezy, then shuffle through your playlists for the Riri’s and Kayne’s. Are you on our wave yet? We wanted to consider it further and give you our take on the trends that are swiftly emerging in the fashion industry. To start off, the umbrella (ella, ella) question that we see being of importance is: How has the fashion industry adapted to big players in the music industry penetrating their space and creating a significant shift?

(Sidebar: If you’re into this stuff and really dig the artist/designer/hip-hop pop-ups of the world, here are a few others to check out: Offwhite by Virgil, Vlone by A$AP Rocky and Bari, SupremexBape collabs, and honestly, even the likes of OVO, but this might trickle into the artist merchandise territory which is a whole new realm. Encourage you to check it out, a friend of mine shed light on it and it’s some neat stuff).

ANYWAYS (I’m so bad at controlling my tangents), moving forward…

Hypothesizing before really jumping into it, Aves and I debated the topic and concluded that a lot of thanks was due to social media and the influence it has had on North American culture. The first place we really started to see the rise of street-wear and model off-duty looks becoming trendy were places like Pinterest and Instagram. Influencers in this game, both models and artists, (DARE WE SAY IT), are seemingly overtaking the power of designers, and skyrocketing into new streams of their careers. Once upon a time, runway fashion was what we looked at to get our inspiration; however, the world is moving to a place where we no longer care about the brand as much as we care about the model or artist representing it; the reference groups are becoming ever significant.

Though we’ve been seeing a lot more growth in the past decade, hip hop started creeping into fashion as early and the 70’s and 80’s, in places such as Harlem. Young rappers, though financially incapable of purchasing high end European brands, such as Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, still valued and thrived off an environment where their fashion statements symbolized the experience they aimed to captivate their audience with. Fake labels started, tampering with these well-established luxury brands, and the initial reactions were far from pleasant. What these brands failed to realize however was that these young artists weren’t just selling clothes; it was an escape for this class of urban youth to embrace the power of fashion and experience a lifestyle that was otherwise outside of their socioeconomic reach.

Today, hip hop is one of America’s greatest cultural exports and back then, the front-runners of fashion who realized that there was potential to tap into this niche (i.e. Tommy Hilfiger and Adidas) are the ones to thank for this revolution towards leveraging hip hop and popular culture as a vehicle of marketing; therefore, altering high fashion to relate more closely to the street-wear displayed in the rap culture. Mainstream labels, like Adidas, realized the power of forming relationships with rappers to exploit their commercial potential. With this, they tapped into new markets that targeted specific followings, communities, and groups using cultural icons; this accelerated hip hop’s journey into becoming one of the largest forms of trans-cultural expression.

We started with legends, like Tupac and Aaliyah, branching out into fashion commercials. Now, in 2017, the list is never ending; anywhere from A$APxDior, Travis ScottxSaint Laurent, PharrellxChanel (you get the point).  Songs like Fashion Week by Wale Ft. G-Eazy, RAF by A$AP Mob ft. A$AP Rocky, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert & Frank Ocean, Nikes by Frank Ocean and even, Juicy Sweatsuits by Blackbear ft. Juicy J are dominating the charts and heavily reference big names and key stakeholders in the fashion industry. The industry has gone as far as actually analyzing how these influencers have impacted big names in fashion, coining terms like the “Kanye Bump” or the “Rocky Effect.” Because of A$AP’s affiliations with brands such as Alexander Wang, Goyard, and Raf Simons, these labels have faced an increase in both consumer knowledge and familiarity as well as profits. Kanye drives growth for brands like Givenchy, Balmain, and Maison Margiela. And lest we forget, Yeezy season and the collaborations with Adidas.

This is sort of where Aves and I had our little epiphany… since when did brands like Puma, Nike, and Adidas become luxury fashion? Surprisingly enough, labels such as Louis Vuitton, Versace, and Ralph Lauren have all taken hits over the past few years, pushed to the curb in their own niche. However, we’re able to see new leaders in the battlefield. We cite Rihanna and Puma, A$AP Rocky and Guess, and Yeezy’s self directed collections as huge players in the evolving fashion industry. Their music and their designs are equally praised by industry experts and therefore, the rapper/designer cohort has tapped into an otherwise siloed market. (Take a second and let that sink in. Kanye West is being equated to the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace). If I were to randomly walk on the street and ask people if they knew Kanye vs. Donatella, I wonder what the result would be. For people who haven’t been on the fashion tip since day 1, icons like Karl Lagerfeld, Donatella Versace, and Coco Chanel really mean nothing to them compared to artists they listen to daily, who they see as reference groups and people to idolize.

For someone whose first love was fashion, followed closely by music, it’s hard for me to dissect the internal conflict I feel thinking about this. I back the Fenty’s and Yeezy’s of the world but I would never let that overtake the respect I have for the people who raised the luxury fashion industry from the ground up and who will continue to blow our minds with entrancing art and runway fashion. At the same time, I would say that this transition into street-wear and the collaboration seen between these two channels of art is much needed to keep up with consumer needs and trends. With the millennial market dominating consumerism and only growing in monetary capital, brands are seeing the need to adapt to street-wear to meet the millennial and cultural demands.  It shifts the fashion industry away from haute couture, and even ready-to-wear collections, and entirely focuses on street-wear and trend production. However, could it be argued that there will always be a distinct delineation between traditional haute couture and this rise in hybrid forms of it (i.e. the street-wear evolution)? Maybe the line is just a little blurred as opposed to completely erased, and this is where the effects of hip-hop plateaus in high fashion; drastic but short-term and stagnant in the upcoming years. Regardless of what happens with the emergence of hip hop and its impressions on high fashion, my two cents are that I just hope that the shift doesn’t continue to cannibalize the efforts of haute couture, and that the downturn in this niche market is only temporary. The OG creative directors and designers will forever have my heart.

Thanks so much for reading and I hope you guys enjoyed this and learned a little bit, we are so totally open to discussion so leave comments if you have any cool facts/opinions to share! Until next time friends.