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  • In Search of the Good Life:Toward a Discourse on Reading the Black Body in Hip-Hop and Luxury Fashion
  • Rikki Byrd (bio)

I always had a passion for flashin'/ Befo' I had it I closed my eyes and imagined, the good life.

—Kanye West, "The Good Life"1

In a video posted on YouTube in 2009, hip-hop artist Kanye West sits in a room alone in Paris.2 He speaks to the camera and begs the question: "Who do you know with two thumbs in their own Louis shoe?" And quickly points to himself. West is referencing a sneaker collaboration that he held with luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton. He tells the camera that he has "been called the Louis Vuitton Don," but insists that he now be referred to by a new name, "Martin Louis the King Jr." and that the viewer should address him as such.

West's moniker combines the luxury fashion house with the name of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and offers a unique entry into an interrogation of black male hip-hop artists' affinity for luxury fashion. As Elena Romero writes in her text on fashion and hip hop, hip-hop artists' desire to wear high-end brands has been a reflection of them "showing their success," which "meant bragging about wearing designer/luxury labels and custom-made jewelry, and driving expensive cars that symbolized the 'good life,'"3 as Kanye West does in the YouTube video. Beyond West's moniker, however, is an effort to both brag about his success, as well as pay homage to his connection to black history. [End Page 180]

At the intersection of fashion and hip-hop is the visual way black hip-hop artists have used clothing to narrate their bodies and control how they navigate the mainstream. Robin M. Chandler and Nuri Chandler-Smith argue that black people's style is the only thing that they have ever fully controlled, and that, in particular in music, "the apparatus through which hip-hop culture speaks so eloquently is through the body."4 If people did not understand their lyrics, certainly seeing a black body clad in the latest trends would communicate visibility and worth. In her discussion of the black male icon of hip hop, Nicole Fleetwood argues that despite the transience of trends that allows the fashion industry to thrive, there are clothing items that are fixed within hip hop such as, "oversized designer jeans; hooded sweatshirts known as 'hoodies'; athletic shoes and boots."5 However, she, like Romero, acknowledges black male hip-hop artists' deviation from these items and their affinity for luxury, equating it to hip-hop artists knack for sampling: "The ever-changing trends, many of which appropriate upper-class status symbols that have been coded as whiteness and privilege, such as luxury car insignias and European fashion designers, are equivalent to the musical practice of sampling."6

Chandler and Chandler-Smith, in their analysis of the influence of hip hop on contemporary fashion, also acknowledge a similar transition from fixed styling practices to luxury clothing: "While old school hip-hop fashion may have been nurtured within poverty, recent hip-hop promotes high-end acquisition: the most expensive sneaker, twenty-four karat jewelry, vintage clothes from previous fashion eras, and hair adornments."7

From namedropping international luxury fashion houses (Migos's "Versace, Versace"), creating personas that include luxury brands (Gucci Mane) or donning luxury looks, hip-hop artists, specifically cisgender black male artists in this article, have looked to luxury as a strategy for enhancing the worth of their black bodies.

Like many contemporary considerations surrounding the black body, we can link this query into hip-hop artists' desire for luxury to American slavery. Monica Miller, in her text Slaves to Fashion, notes that as early as the 1550s slaves were "regarded as luxury items and ornaments rather than laborers. They were therefore dandified, dressed in hyper haute versions of the latest fashion."8 How then can we explain the evolution of Miller's historical account of the black body as luxury item to hip-hop artists' transgressing their identities via visually expressing their cultural, social, and economic...

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