![]() Biggie might big up Louis Vuitton, but its customers were white, old and didn’t want their couturier draped across an ex-drug dealer. Their focus on the grittier sides of street culture made brands wary. Rap’s first commercial flush put its stars in financial reach of luxury, but they were still locked out by geography and race. The uniform of rock was stuff that would frighten fans’ mothers for rap, it was clothes that backed up your bars. No other sound has focused so much on starting from the bottom, perhaps because no other music has been so dominated by artists who started life at the bottom. Rap is arguably music’s most entrepreneurial genre, obsessed with graft and hustle, status and the path up from the streets. For those pioneering black artists who grew up amid crime and violence, whose music helped them transcend their place of birth and their lack of opportunities, European luxury brands were the original flex a middle finger to a society that had written them off and a diamond-dripping, mink-trimmed embodiment of the American Dream for the people who bought their records. Its look mattered as much as the sound, partly as an expression of self-identity, partly as shorthand for success. They know that they’ve made it.” Ever since DJ Kool Herc’s first block parties, hip-hop has been a voice for the marginalised. They’re not just using it to promote these symbols that they’ve made it. “They understand that they are now brands and they understand the power that their brands have. Luxury logos have always been signals of success hip-hop, but rap’s explosion has shifted expectations. “With hip-hop being the de facto sound of youth and rebellion, a lot of the prominent artists – be it Beyoncé or Kanye West or ASAP Rocky – are now like, ‘Why am I giving people free press?'” says Jian DeLeon, editorial director at Highsnobiety. Now it’s brands like Burberry that come knocking, and rappers who rebuff them. ![]() Like the rest of the fashion industry, Burberry coincidentally overcame its distaste for rap just as rap became the loudest sound on earth in December, Nielsen research found more people listened to rap than rock for the first time. ![]() It’s dressed Skepta and Nicki Minaj and recently collaborated with Chinese rapper Kris Wu. A few months later, Burberry sent Ja Rule a letter of thanks.Ī decade and more on, the brand has a different stance on hip-hop style. “People have this stigma with the urban community.” She bought it anyway and after she draped her client in the brand’s house check, his fans did too. “They didn’t want him to wear their stuff,” Johnson later told Newsweek. It was the kind of exposure that brands generally love, but Burberry refused to help. Her client was Ja Rule, then promoting the follow-up to his Grammy-nominated, triple-platinum album Pain is Love. In 2002, stylist Rachel Johnson walked into a Burberry store in New York to request some clothes for a photoshoot. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Growing up in Los Angeles, he also became a movie fan and a young extra in several films, even appearing in a few scenes with up-and-coming child actor Mickey Rooney. That was OK by them––nobody wanted a friend who had a sissy’s name.” This portrait of the young Buck Compton was taken in the village of Aldbourne, England, just before Christmas 1943. I informed all my friends that Buck was the only name I’d answer to. It was settled––Buck Compton was my new name. How about Buck? That was close enough for jazz. Sounded tough, but I also sounded like a copycat. Compton, at an early age, thought: “If he could have a nickname, why couldn’t I? One day in grammar school, I rolled around in my head the name-Truck Compton. The team had a player named Truck Hannah, whose real name was James Harrison Hannah. Angels, a minor-league team in south Los Angeles. Always a baseball fan, his favorite team was the L.A. But to me, Lynn was a girl’s name and always will be.” “My mother’s father was from Lynn, Massachusetts,” he said, “and named Lyndley in honor of the town, so that’s where my name came from. As might be expected, the young man hated his first name. To begin at the beginning, Compton was born in Los Angeles, California, on New Year’s Eve 1921. It has made for a great recently released book, Call of Duty: My Life Before, During, and After the Band of Brothers, written with Marcus Brotherton and including a foreword by John McCain. His life story would make a great film or TV series in its own right. Thanks to the late historian Stephen Ambrose, his book Band of Brothers, and the HBO series of the same title, the legendary, extraordinary exploits of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 101st Airborne Division, have become well known to a whole new generation.Īnd one of the most extraordinary men who served with that outfit is Lynn “Buck” Compton. ![]() |
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