DAPPER DAN & BLACK CREATIVITY UNDER CAPITALISM
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MCM221 ASSIGNMENT 1
DAPPER DAN & BLACK CREATIVITY
UNDER CAPITALISM
In 2019, Dapper Dan, born Daniel Day,
announced a limited edition of his Harlem collection, adding another
addition to his ongoing line with Gucci as well as completing a return to cultural
relevance for the first time in a decade. Numero Homme magazine held a shoot in
Harlem to commemorate the occasion, later releasing a Behind The Scenes of the
whole process and while one can feel joy at black expression shown on such a
large scale, diving deeper into Dap’s background and the circumstances that
lead him here, it paints a different more complicated picture.
Daniel Day was born on August 8th,
1944, in Harlem, New York, at his family home with his grandmother acting as a
midwife. Daniel grew up on 129th and Lexington Avenue with 6 other
siblings and his parents, Robert and Lily, a civil servant and a homemaker who
had moved up north to escape the Jim Crow South. Growing up in a post-World War
2 america was tough on the Day household. Robert Day worked multiple other jobs
to feed them, while Lily Day made do with their small 3-bedroom apartment, and
on top of that, it had quickly become apparent that the north wasn’t much different
from the south, just Skyscrapers instead of plantations. Daniel began working
odd jobs from a young age to support his family, eventually becoming a talented
gambler in a bid to make ends meet. It was during this that he met an older
gambler by the name of Dapper Dan, getting close to him and later adopting the
name for himself. As Dap grew, his life became more and more chaotic, from
continued gambling to credit fraud to using drugs, selling drugs, and getting
arrested for selling drugs. Dap did it all, eventually turning his life around
after a one-month stint in prison and listening to a Malcolm X speech in which
he heard the quote, “If you want to understand the flower, study the seed”, meaning
that empowerment through knowledge is crucial to liberation, taking this quote
to heart, in 1968, Dap began working as a writer for Harlem newspaper Forty
Acres And A Mule where he wrote on gentrification in Harlem and the black
experience from his point of view which caught the attention of the Urban League
and Columbia University who sponsored him on tour throughout Africa to broaden
his horizon and improve his journalism, Dap returned to Africa in 1974
initially to witness the “Rumble In The Jungle” between George Foreman
and Muhammad Ali, it was due to a delay for the fight that he toured Zaire (now
the Democratic Republic of Congo) where he came across tailoring and fashion he
had never seen sparking a long dead love of fashion he had gotten from his
mother and upon returning to the US, he got hard at work. Dap initially sold his
goods out of his car trunk before opening his first boutique, Dapper Dan’s
Boutique in 1982, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. His process in
designing and styling was informed a lot by his past as a gambler, which taught
him the importance of appearance and perception, asking himself, “Who are they?”
and “What do they want?” when working his magic. The magic, meanwhile,
consisted of the use of high-end logos such as Gucci on everyday streetwear or refashioning
Louis Vuitton bags into suits or furs that could keep you warm in the harshest
winters. Dap himself couldn’t sew, but through his connections in his native
Harlem, he had assembled a team that had brought high fashion to the average resident
of Harlem then to dealers, pimps and alleged crime bosses, it wasn’t long
before his clientele included the likes of Mike Tyson, Rakim and LL Cool J all
while redifining what high fashion meant. His work with hip-hop stars in
particular established a long-lasting bond between the genre and fashion,
upheld in the future by the likes of the late great Virgil Abloh, who took Dap’s
ideas of melding high fashion and streetwear and pushing them further than ever
before or artists like Kanye West and A$AP Rocky becoming known outside their
discographies for their exploits in the fashion world. Dapper was flying high
until in 1988 after Mike Tyson and Mitch Green got into a fight just outside
the store and suddenly all eyes were on where Mike Tyson got his fake Fendi
jacket from and by 1992 after legal action from Fendi themselves and then U.S
attorney Sonia Sotomayor, Dan’s boutique was shut down and despite his exploits
the larger fashion world shunned him, leading him to go “underground”, out of
the spotlight and do private lines for the likes of Floyd Mayweather, Aaliyah, Ghostface
Killah and getting name-dropped by artists such as Jay Z and Nicki Minaj solidifying
his ties to hip-hop and black pop culture. In 2017, Gucci’s creative director designed
a jacket based on Dap’s work on a jacket for Olympic gold medalist Diane Dixon
from 1989, which caught social media’s attention, which began a call for Dapper
Dan to be properly recognized for his influence, which led to Gucci to begin a
partnership that is ongoing to this day which resulted in the opening of Dapper
Dan Of Harlem on Lenox Avenue, the first luxury house fashion store in
Harlem.
Now, what does all this history have to do
with the topic? Well, I’ll answer that with another question: why did Dapper
Dan’s story have to take so many twists and turns? Why couldn’t he just go to a
fashion school? Why was his clientele and style so specific? The answer to all
this is, Daniel Day was a black man from Harlem. Dap’s life and actions while his
own are inseparable from the color of skin, and what that means in the U.S, it
meant he was born a second class citizen, it meant he was to be exploited and
nothing more, it meant the heights he reached, the status he attained, the
influence he has left was never open for him to achieve it hence he had to cut
corners, sell out of his car, shoplift materials and blaze his own path because
there was no road for a black man from Harlem, like Malcolm X said, “If you
want to understand the flower, study the seed”, black people have had to do
double the effort historically to even get half, our empowerment at home and
across the diaspora from Lagos to Harlem is always seen as a threat. That being
said what does this have to do with Capitalism? Simple, while Marx correctly
analyzed the situation between the haves and have-nots, he failed to
acknowledge the intersectionality between race and class. In Dap’s case, his
expression is called illegal despite him using similar tactics to the brands he
sold, his influence was suppressed until the powers that be saw it was
profitable, which is the story of black art under capitalism, currently
afrobeats and amapiano is all over the world because label heads have realized
how profitable it is and much like Dap and other black creatives the highest we
are allowed is a seat at the table, we almost never head the table, rarely enjoy
the full the true value of our labor which is the function of capitalism, to
extract, exploit and profit with no regard for anyone affected only those that
organised the system, typically, straight white men. There’s a dark comedy to
high fashion chasing Dap away from expressing himself in his own home, only to
bring him back decades later to neighborhoods gentrified and culture hanging on
by a thread when there was money to be made, almost to remind him that he can
have a seat but won’t ever call the meetings or run the show.
In conclusion, something as simple as a
photoshoot can be a reminder of the reality of being a black creative under
capitalism, even as things change for the better, the existence of black
billionaires and presidents serves to uphold what is instead of ushering in
what can be. Still, I find myself smiling, knowing in my lifetime Dapper Dan
finally has his shine and that other black creatives, while not free of
exploitation, can still create, innovate, and break down barriers.
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