Relay Column: Hip-Hop Culture Amplifies & Refreshes Fashion Expression in the High Fashion World (Po Lung Huang)

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PROFILE

Po Lung Huang

Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Promoting Intercultural Studies, Kobe University. Ph.D. (Arts). Specializes in sociology, cultural studies, and street dance culture. Recently, he has been interested in the "sportification" of breakdancing due to the Olympics. He also focuses on baseball cultural exchange and its relationship between Japan and Taiwan from a postcolonial perspective. Major papers include "Japanese street dance culture in manga and anime: Hip hop transcription in Samurai Champloo and Tokyo Tribe-2," "EAJPC 7" (1), "忘れられた台湾野球の名誉と台湾人アイデンティティ－を取り戻す," "年報カルチュラル・スタディーズ" Vol. 3 (Koshisha, 2015, in English), among others.
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We will discuss how hip-hop cultural expressions have been incorporated into the production of high fashion products, amplifying and refreshing "fashion expression." This topic might seem like cultural elements of the counterculture of hip-hop, which has fought against economic disparities and (racial) discrimination, have merely been appropriated by high-fashion designers (of white affluent classes).

However, when examining the contact between hip-hop culture and high fashion, it's evident that the synchronized expression from the clashing ethos of both enrich one another. Considering this trend, the establishment of high-fashion product production and its distribution is a result of utilizing the dynamics of hip-hop diffusion. In other words, executives of high fashion owe a debt to hip-hop.

Hip-Hop Spreading in the High Fashion World

This was an abstract discussion, but examples of hip-hop and street culture spreading into the high-fashion world are often seen. For instance, Italian fashion house GUCCI's collaboration with Japan's Medicom Toy Corporation to create a commemorative BE@RBRICK for their 90th anniversary (2011) garnered attention. It featured a 400% sized, glossy black BE@RBRICK adorned with Gucci's iconic logo (Figure 1).

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