hoodwear diaries:
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Streetwear Has Always
Been Inaccessible.
by aishamanne williams
The 2021 issue of the Hoodwear Diaries zine included an interview with Thirstin Howl III. Thirstin, aka The Polo Rican (born Victor DeJesus), is a cofounder of the Lo Life crew. He said of the “We made [Ralph Lauren]’s clothing to be worshipped religiously, not just like a brand of fashion. It’s a religious garment. We turned it into a uniform for hip-hop, almost like a mandatory uniform to the point where if you weren’t wearing this, you’re not official.”
Hoodwear Diaries focuses on the intersections between fashion and hip-hop, inspired by the understanding that fashion (at large; streetwear especially) owes credit to hip-hop for much of its trends throughout history. Many people’s memory serves them well enough to know that Polo is cool because hip-hop made it cool. Fewer people know about the Lo Lifes.
We previously defined ‘hoodwear’ as a developing understanding of the importance of fashion to community, livelihood, and cultural history. ‘Streetwear’, to be understood in the most honest and basic way, is clothing worn by people in/of the streets.
The streets are where hip-hop comes from, not what hip-hop is. And by the time the people making hip-hop achieve a level of visibility that allows them to influence what brands and products trend, they’ve made it. They’re now experiencing enough commercial success to become what we’d call ‘influencers’ today. Rappers are proof that you can be famous and underprivileged. But fame is power nonetheless, and this power affords them endorsements and free clothes and never-ending access to flyness.
Before, you had to grab flyness from the stores with your own two hands and make it your own. You had to risk your freedom to be fly. And if you were good at it, it granted you freedom.
That’s what it has always been about. It wasn’t that people knew who Ralph Lauren was or even cared. But the price point of his clothing and the demographics of his audience were silent indicators to people from places like Crown Heights and Brownsville that it wasn’t for them. It was ‘above’ them. So the Lo Lifes, and boosters across urban cities in America, would go into stores and bring what was above them down to earth where they could reach. And they’d become famous on their block, in their hood, in their city, just for wearing what wasn’t theirs.
The fact that they had made it their own gave them visibility. They were celebrated by their communities. The more the boosters were celebrated, the more the brands were worshipped. History will remember the religion of Polo through the lens of Ralph Lauren the man. Names like Thirstin Howl III are always relegated to fine print, if they even make it to the page.
Hip-hop still doesn’t get enough credit for its power to impact fashion, which is why highlighting the connection between the two matters. But the story of hip-hop’s impact on streetwear cannot be told without first acknowledging the streets. The freedom Polo gave to Thirstin Howl III and the Lo Lifes were the wings to fly above the crime, poverty, and struggle paving the streets they called home. They could have been caught up in prison, substance abuse, or worse. As is the case with all ghettos, they didn’t have much but they had life. Even if their lifestyles were not the same as the majority of Polo’s audience (the kinds of people with the money and time to go hunting and camping for fun), they took what wasn’t theirs and it made their lives different.
Rack-Lo, another cofounder of the Lo Life crew, explained in a 2016 interview with The Fader how boosting Polo felt like an escape for him and his friends. “By seeing the clothing,” he said, “it inspired us to know that there was more to life than being in Brooklyn and being stuck here, living at this limited pace. It inspired us to pursue those things: to go yachting, to be on Fifth Avenue, to be a part of the rich and the elite, and to try and acquire the American Dream the way we know how to do it. And that was through fashion and boosting.”
To understand the access issues around streetwear in 2024, it must first be acknowledged that streetwear has always been inaccessible. In fact, most brands that come to mind when we think of the streetwear of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and even early 2000s, were too expensive for anybody from the streets to afford. They are considered streetwear now because people from the streets took what wasn’t theirs back then. They were left out and chose to create access on their own. And this only causes the brands that left them out to be celebrated and supported even more.
The Instagram account @polofromstreets is run by Nikitos (aka Boostin Lo) from Russia, who hosts a digital museum of ‘Lo culture’ through the ‘80s and ‘90s. In an interview with him featured in the 2021 Hoodwear Diaries zine, he said: “Polo Ralph Lauren would never have been so popular and important if Lo-Life didn't wear it and do it their own way. Their influence was always noticeable. Many music videos, many rap artists, many designers were influenced by what Lo-Lifes did in the 80s and 90s.”
In Very Ralph (2019), the first documentary portrait of Ralph Lauren as a fashion icon, there is a segment dedicated to Thirstin Howl III and the Lo Lifes’ contributions to the brand. Thirstin also modeled in the re-release of Ralph Lauren’s vintage pieces, and Ralph Lauren sent him a letter personally thanking him for his influence on the brand. There are many more brands who owe a lot of their impact to names we may never know. And even the ones we do know are only remembered through the lens of a brand.
While the Lo Lifes deserve to be celebrated as being largely responsible for Ralph Lauren’s impact, they are also more than that. As someone who grew up in Crown Heights, when I first learned about them I found the Polo history interesting, but I was far more interested in what their lives were like. What was the Crown Heights they grew up in like? If Brownsville was a ‘don’t go over there unless you’re from over there’ neighborhood as I was growing up, what was Brownsville like when they were young? What were their favorite restaurants, where did they go to buy albums? I took long train rides from Crown Heights to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan every day to attend college. That same long ride took them to clothing stores where they boosted fly pieces.
But what did they do after? That train ride contained all my thoughts and imaginations on the way to class, heading further and further from being surrounded by anybody that looked like me or understood me. What were they thinking about on the way?
Maybe none of that matters to anyone but me. Maybe no one cares about the potential that people from the hood have to be designers and creatives rather than mascots for brands who shut them out. Maybe no one but me wonders what history would be like, what today’s fashion would be like, if the streets had more power to create rather than to consume. But what I (and the Lo Lifes, and Dapper Dan, and you) know is that even when we consume, we create. We remix and innovate until our innovations become more powerful than the original product.
That’s what streetwear means to me. Today, those creating the ‘original product’ have caught on to this cycle. Now, this power of remixing and innovation is being co-opted and sold back to the streets like it’s new to them.
But the streets will always find ways to create access. In the 80s’ and 90s’ there were boosters and Polo became big. In the 2010s’ there were scammers, and…well, why else do you think Mike Amiri’s brand gets a shoutout every time a rapper from Canarsie drops a song?
Before that started happening, Amiri jeans were less coveted by certain communities than they are now (by those communities, and people beyond them). The brand grows, and the rappers are just…rappers.
Streetwear is political because fashion is. Clothing is. Rap is deeper than rap and rappers are bigger than rappers: they’re the first influencers. And while their influence matters, it isn’t the full story—brand influencers today are people who speak to brands on behalf of communities, and then speak to communities on behalf of brands. If we only ever focus on the influencers, the communities never get credit.
Everything that is cool can be traced back to something that someone took from the streets. It’s taken, made popular enough to be inaccessible, and when the streets get a word of it they find a way to take it back.
There is a will to be free, so there will always be a way to get fly.