HIP-HOP & STREETWEAR

Hip-hop is born in the Bronx, New York, in the early 1970s — DJ Kool Herc's party on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, is often cited as the founding moment, when he isolated and looped the instrumental "break" of records for dancers. A whole culture grows around DJing: MCing (rap), breakdancing, and graffiti — the "four pillars."

Fashion comes along early: by the 1980s, hip-hop already had its own visual vocabulary — Kangol hats, tracksuits, gold chains, sneakers — spreading nationwide as the music reached radio and music video.

It's a culture born from the economic hardship of the 1970s South Bronx, in block and building parties, where reputation is built by competing — in rhyme, in dance, in graffiti. Clothes and sneakers carry status and identity from the start: what you wear says where you're from and who you answer to.

Streetwear as a fashion category grows within that logic — remixing luxury symbols (brands, logos) instead of simply aspiring to them, turning display into a language the street owns.

Run-D.M.C. release "My Adidas" in 1986, and Adidas — noticing the shoe was already worn laceless as the group's symbol — signs one of the first sponsorship deals between an athletic brand and musical artists, decades before that became industry standard.

In Harlem, tailor Dapper Dan opens an atelier in the 1980s where he reproduces and remixes luxury logos like Gucci and Louis Vuitton into custom pieces for the hip-hop scene — unlicensed, and legally targeted for it at the time. Decades later, in 2017, Gucci itself officially hires Dapper Dan, closing a symbolic loop of appropriation.

In the 1990s, streetwear gains brands built from inside the culture — FUBU, Cross Colours, Karl Kani — alongside the rise of a skate-adjacent strand, like Supreme, founded in New York in 1994.

Streetwear born from hip-hop becomes, in the following decades, one of global fashion's most valuable categories — collaborations between street brands and luxury houses (Supreme x Louis Vuitton, 2017) go from exception to standard business model.

The sneaker culture created in this period generates its own resale and collector market, worth billions of dollars a year today.