To celebrate half a century of Hip Hop, The Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology presents “Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip-Hop Style,” one of the largest and most comprehensive exhibitions on this revolutionary and influential style.
The birth of hip hop spread throughout the world and it was during the 1980s that it took an unexpected turn, influencing music and fashion for generations, according to its curator Elena Romero.
“I hope that when people come to this exhibit they see that Hip Hop is more than just putting on big clothes with big names, fashion is a performance thing, and it’s the communication of youth, whether it’s from the 1970s or right now in today,” he says.
The Bronx-born genre was born on a hot summer night in 1973, when DJ Kool Herc and his sister Cindy organized a legendary back-to-school party, years later this went down in history.
“And at that point it can already be said that he was internationally famous, in music and also in fashion, we began to see designers from the Latino and Afro-Latin communities begin to create their own fashion, because our bodies are different, and many of fashion came from Europe”, adds Romero.
Style is one of the most visible and dominant manifestations of this culture, from luxury brands to everyday clothes, they acquired an important relevance thanks to hip hop.
Elena Romero remembers:
“Many times, Latinos and the Afro-American community were invisible here in America, specifically in the United States, and doing big things was a way of saying look, I am here and I exist.”
Here you will be able to appreciate more than 100 pieces and accessories, including Latin designers, who represent Hip Hop until April 23, completely free.
Some may think that hip hop is all about jeans baggies, oversized T-shirts, sparkly jewelry and sneakers that were all popular during that era, but Romero insists that hip hop goes further than that and will last for generations to come.
“If you have clothes from the 70s, 80s and 90s, this is the stage, now that you take it out of the closet, the clothes that have his name, the necklaces and the straps because what was old is now new once more,” says Romero.
This would be the first time that a museum has had this type of exhibition that examines fashion through a musical genre.
