Fresh Dressed, film review: From Easy Rider to European fashion shows

(15) Sacha Jenkins, 84 mins

An examination of hip hop and urban fashion in ‘Fresh Dressed’ (CNN)

"Clothes are your wings," one interviewee observes early on in Fresh Dressed, Sacha Jenkins's feature doc on the rise of hip hop and "urban" fashion. The film follows a thread that leads from Easy Rider (the "outlaw look") to the fashion choices of New York street gangs in the Seventies and Eighties (leather jackets and vests), and then on to department stores and catwalks at big European fashion shows.

Race and class loom large. An "urban customer" is defined (at least by the white establishment) as "a scary black or Latino individual who wants to spend money". Where the urban customers lead, others follow.

That was one reason why Tommy Hilfiger was ready to give out clothes for free in downtown New York. He was more than aware that if Tupac Shakur wore a brand or it was featured in a Gap commercial, then sales would immediately rocket.

Jenkins explores the many paradoxes surrounding hip-hop fashion. For kids growing up impoverished in Harlem, Brooklyn or the Bronx, clothes were the most obvious and accessible status symbols. They were about aspiration and affluence.

As years passed, African-American designers began to compete on level terms with the long-established European fashion houses. Sean "Puffy" Combs talks on camera about "combining" what he noticed on the streets around him and what he saw on "runways around the world" to create something entirely new.

However, consumers turned their back on these designers. The market was over-saturated with urban brands, the European designers were stealing their ideas anyway and the brands didn't have "staying power".

As one astute designer puts it, "most urban people really don't want things made by other urban people… they want to buy into a dream".

"Everything comes down to class. The class conversation is bigger than the race conversation," is how Kanye West sums up the reasons urban brands began to struggle.

However fickle the market, Jenkins makes it clear that the urban brands continue to exercise a huge influence on the fashion world today. The fascination of Fresh Dressed lies in the inventive and revealing way it interweaves politics, music and sociology. This, it turns out, is much more than just a documentary about fashion.