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"I think it's time to show these boys how to dress," Andre 3000 says ...
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Dupri says stop dressing like Bow Wow and start rolling like Mr. Drummond ...
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Page 3
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Cam'ron scoffs at the dandies, Farnsworth balks at the
velour ...
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Don't get it twisted, though. Yes, some of our favorite performers are experiencing a coming-of-age, but the button-ups, cuff links, the blazer and all the other high-class accessories have as much to do with fashion as they do with growing up.
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"Fab had throwbacks in his video. You would watch the video and say, 'Wow, he got Elden Campbell.'"
- Jermaine Dupri
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"Personally, I stopped wearing jerseys because the throwbacks don't mean what they meant," JD says. "You used to see me on MTV with a throwback that nobody had. Fabolous, too. Fab had throwbacks in his video. You would watch the video and say, 'Wow, he got Elden Campbell.' Now, you go to the mall, and everybody in the mall got the same throwback on that you got. It ain't nothing."
"The other thing also with the throwbacks is that people was covering up because they didn't really know how to dress," Swizz Beatz adds. "A throwback is an easy uniform; white tee, throwback, hat. 'Who's the hottest playa? Let me rock that.' But now, we're [moving into] another era where your style and your taste is gonna have to show."
Wearing more adult apparel isn't an entirely new trend. In the 1990 movie "House Party," all the kids looked snazzy as they danced in Play's crib. Who could forget the jiggy explosion that Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy ushered in? People who couldn't even pronounce Versace and Armani were shelling out the dough to keep in step with the labels Big Poppa name-dropped in his music. But in those days, the clothes were more playalistic. Bentley, Kanye and their disciples, on the other hand, are wearing clothes that are truly conservative, even preppy.
Bentley says he got his sense of style from looking back to a time long, long ago.
"Mr. Bentley is the distinguished gentleman, frozen in the 1930s, only to be unthawed in hip-hop culture," Farnsworth, born Derek Watkins, says of his origins. "So all the ideals and etiquette of the 1930s — the way I dress to the way I treat a lady — have just been thrown into hip-hop culture. So it's gonna be a little bit different. It's really just taking the banner of Duke Ellington and the Nicholas brothers, Sammy Davis Jr. and raising their banner higher. Nothing I'm doing is new. You look at old photographs from the '30s and this is how people dressed. [The '30s were] the most elegant time period."
Of course, as with any fashion trend, dressing "grown" is not for everybody.
"Being from Harlem, it really isn't a trend to be followed," Cam'ron says. "It's about getting dressed in the morning and saying 'I'm Cam, I'm going to be fly regardless.' It doesn't matter what is going on in the world. A lot of people just walk down with a tight vest and jacket. That ain't even fly, that's just tacky, 'cause I don't know nobody where I live that hangs out on the corner with no damn vest and short-arm jackets that come [up to your elbows]. All that's going on is a white tee, long-john shirt, Air Ones or beef and broccoli [chocolate and forest green] Timbs or construction Timbs. Hundred fifty [thousand] on the neck, another hundred thou on the wrist."
" 'The dress-shirt mafia', that's what I call them," laughs Cam's friend Dame Dash. Dash says although he will agree that jerseys are played out, he's not dressing up. In fact, in many of those high-class board meetings he attends, he'll dress "way down" and still come off like one of the most dignified people in the world because, as he tells it, "I hit them with a bunch of logic. Something that's gonna make somebody a couple of million or half a billion!"
Dame's latest money caper is capitalizing on the gentleman's movement by starting a clothing line called Wash House that caters to the button-up frenzy. Other designers such as Sean Combs with Sean John and traditionally non-urban labels like Hugo Boss are also trying to profit from the craze, which is apparently going to be big in the mainstream as well, if you checked the runways a few months ago.
It's too early to know if the gentleman's movement will have more staying power than the throwback era, but if Mr. Bentley has his wish, getting dressed to the nines will become an institution in households that will spawn traditions to be passed down from generation to generation.
"My granddaddy passed down a fedora," Bentley, a few minutes removed from his near-orgasmic time spent with the basket of pocket squares, says about the early experience that set him on the path to being the gentleman he is today. "You can pass down something classy like a fedora to your son. You can't say, 'Here son, take this velour [tracksuit]. Yeah, take this va-lourrre — with this stain on it."
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Photo: MTV News
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