Conclusion
Hip hop culture encompasses various values, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences. It could be a medium for creation and self-expression; it could be a means of bridging gaps between different races and classes; it could be a way rebellious youth make themselves to be heard. Jeans from those selected hip hop fashion lines represent hip hop culture by their abundant imagination and creation, bald self-expression, mixing of different cultures, and accommodation of new trends. Oversized and exaggerated style of jeans could hardly find their appearance in designers’ drafts. The days when big baggy jeans are the symbol for hip hop are still remembered, but today, trendy hip hop jeans are becoming more and more high-fashioned, sophisticated, well-tailored, and classic looking. Formal and classic style dressing is now encroaching hip hop fashion world. As today’s fashion industry is becoming high-end fashion world, so is hip hop fashion.
Hip hop fashion labels are trying their best to attract larger consumer demography, and at the same time, highlight their unique style that separate them from their counterparts. They make their jeans as well as other fashion items classic and easy to be embraced. Yet it is almost an irresistible trend that every corporation pursues high-end fashion and high profitable fashion strategies. After all, business is business. Hip hop fashion as a whole is becoming expensive. Extravagant designers’ clothes dominate the market. Long ago, hip hop clothes were highlighted and advertised by the great influence of hip hop; today fashion items from hip hop fashion labels promote hip hop culture to outsiders by their overwhelming glamour and style.
Jeans and hip hop fashion is an uncultivated land for research. Analysis of both fields as well as their intersect are worthwhile since the study of popular culture and fashion could shed light on many social, political, and economic agendas. Further research could be done in studying more hip hop fashion labels and their print advertisements as a means to discover hip hop culture and dressing more in depth, and to examine more social, political, and economic issues within hip hop culture.
