If the white tee is the ultimate summertime hip-hop accessory, then the black hoodie becomes the essential item for every rap kid when the weather gets colder than relations between 50 Cent and the Game.
Lightweight enough to layer with a bubblegoose but still heavy enough to keep your dome warm, hoodies have been a staple of hip-hop fashion since the early '80s. But as designers have remixed the zip-up variation with everything from brighter colors to Swarovski crystals to all-over printings, the hoodie went high class in 2006 — and exploded after Jay-Z rocked them regularly on his Water for Life Tour. On his recent Hangar Tour, Jay even modified a lyric in "P.S.A." to pay homage to the hoodie: "Check out my hood, yo, you peep the way I'm wearing it."
"It started with [A Bathing Ape], Nigo flipped it up and made it pop with colors," Marc Ecko Enterprises lifestyle specialist Shahendra Ohneswere explained. "Then the all-over print caught on and everybody starting doing the same thing, and [now] a lot of brands have a variation, from chains to skulls."
Today, the designer hoodie is ubiquitous, with Kanye West wearing a skeleton-design piece by LRG during Paris Fashion Week and Jay-Z jet-setting in a hoodie by the Hundreds during his Hangar Tour. The hoodie-heads here at MTV News plowed through dozens of photos looking for some of the past year's hottest items, and asked some of our more fashionable friends — rappers, stylists, and consultants — to weigh in on the trend.
