Adams of the New York Amsterdam News, a Black weekly, just days before the Zoot Suit Riots began in Los Angeles. “Many of the more daring of our Americans studied his garments before seeing their tailors,” wrote Julius J. The duke was a dandyish dresser who was much in the press in those days. The English drape was a favorite of the Duke of Windsor, briefly Edward VIII, who abdicated the British throne to marry Wallis Simpson in 1936. The design, Peiss writes, “emphasized male athleticism and virility.” The looser pant created a drape around the legs, which is how the suit (and later the zoot suit) got its moniker. The cut featured boxy shoulders and roomier arm holes, as well as a loose, high-waisted pant that flared at the knee and was cuffed at the ankle. What we do know is that its vital precursor emerged in the 1930s: a style known as the “English drape” - a men’s suit that was less restrictive and offered a bit more panache than other early 20th century styles. The origin story of the zoot suit is one of a few facts and a whole lot of lore. “It’s never gone out of style,” she says. Marquez, who also serves as fashion director at large for The Times’ Image magazine, recently teamed with eight other designers to create updated versions of the suit. “For me, it’s a timeless silhouette,” says stylist and designer Keyla Marquez, founder of the L.A.-based Lujo Depot, which rents wardrobe for fashion and music video shoots. Have a look at Fresno-born, New York-based designer Willy Chavarria’s 2023 spring menswear collection and you will find echoes of the exaggerated contours of the zoot suit in his work: broad shoulders, tight waist and generous pants. Yet the suit is with us still - employed as a formal garment for weddings and proms, as stage attire for pop acts and even as inspiration for high fashion. It has been almost a century since the earliest (and much more modest) versions of the zoot suit began to emerge in urban centers across the United States. But only in L.A., writes historian Kathy Peiss in her informative 2011 book, “ Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style,” “did a style of dress become the focal point of unrest or figure prominently in the response.” There were other episodes of violent upheaval over the summer of 1943 - including race riots in Detroit and New York. Where and how the Zoot Suit Riots swept across L.A. You’ll also find a story about the ways in which Black and brown youths are criminalized for the looks they adopt. Within the zoot suit, you’ll find a uniquely American story of style. “It is considered the first uniquely American suit,” says Clarissa Esguerra, a curator of costume and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which acquired a rare 1940s zoot suit for its permanent collection in 2011). Since then, it has been periodically reborn through revivals - like one in the late 1970s when Edward James Olmos donned a sleek black suit in Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit,” the trenchant, musical play turned Hollywood film. The zoot suit, colloquially known in its era as “drapes,” was, by most accounts, made prominent by African Americans in Harlem and then quickly embraced by working-class youths across the country and across racial lines - in California, by Mexican Americans, Filipinos and a small subset of Japanese Americans who took their suits with them to World War II-era incarceration camps. It is adopted by bandleaders and jazz musicians who add bold ties in colorful prints. As it travels the country in the late 1930s, the coats grow longer, the pants more voluminous and the waists ever more cinched. It is copied, amended and upgraded, embraced by Hollywood actors in search of the fashionable. A suit lands in the United States on the back of an exiled king.
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