Introduction

In 1999, as a young Italian b-boy eager for knowledge, I came across a book featuring a captivating photograph of the legendary black rapper LL Cool J. The picture showed him performing live, confidently holding the microphone in one hand and his crotch with the other, displaying his impressive muscular arms and tattoos. In a move that was a clear act of artistic and sexual confidence, Cool J wore a classic Kangol bucket, perfectly matched with a basketball tank top and a pair of baggy jeans, giving the whole image a look of elegance and ghetto glamour that encapsulated the essence of late 90s hip-hop masculinity.¹ Or, as I soon understood, just its front image.

On the one hand, such a “machist” version of hip-hop male identity appeared as the re-enactment and commodification of old racist tropes concerning black masculinity surfacing the history of Anglo-American popular culture: from the late 18^th Century “black dandy” as a hyper-haute dressed and mischievous subject in the British stage; to the mid-19^th century blackface minstrel tradition, depicting black people as music enthusiasts but with the potential to be rapists; up to the “Birth” of American narrative cinema where black male characters were also represented as brutes and hypersexual “Mandingoes”, and later as mendaciously “gangsta”.²

One the other hand, from its very mainstreaming in the early 1980s “hip-hop masculinity” and its associated fashion, were characterized by a certain “ambiguity” which challenged the racilized representation of black people mentioned above. Take black graffiti pioneer of Italian descendant Rammellzze whose casting of cross-gender characters made a staple of hip-hop redesign of visual and performance art;³ the flamboyant stage costumes of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force reconnecting with the Afrofuturist and Panafricanist movement, or the “1970’s-pimp-meets-the-Village People” look of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five;⁴ up to the characterization of Ozone (Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quiñones), the leading characters of Breakin’ (Silberg, 1984), whose dance moves and fashion look are indebted to the LA gay club scene and reminisces the androgynous looks of artists like Prince or Michael Jackson.⁵ Vikki Tobak’s Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-hop Culture offered a good picture of that by recollecting intriguing backstage stories of famous shoots which oriented the idea of gender identity in hip-hop consumers from 1979 to 2003, revealing a prismatic, self-conscious and progressive thinking behind the work of photographers and hip-hop artist.⁶

By deconstructing the racial (and economically profitable) framework underpinning the perpetuation of a stereotyped “blackness” into hip-hop culture, the seminal work of Tricia Rose aims to reassess this prismatic image and the empowering role of black and rap masculinity.⁷ As Rose aptly analyzes, from being a counter-hegemonic tool of liberation, hip-hop (especially rap music and its associated culture) has been progressively demonised for causing violence, undermining American values, reflecting dysfunctional social behaviour, and hoasting women and black people: “since the middle of the 90s” — the author points out — “the social, artistic, and political significance of figures like the gangsta and street hustler substantially devolved into apolitical, simple-minded, almost comic stereotypes” inflating what she defines as the “hyper-gangsta-ization” of black rappers.⁸

As it’s known, the first mainstreaming and flattening of some distinctive traits of hip-hop masculinity took place during the rise of a third generation of black rappers and their association with the subgenre of “gangsta rap”. A period of canonization and mainstreaming of hip-hop aesthetical and cultural traits writ large, which took place from the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s and soon was mythicized as the “Golden Age rap”.⁹ As in the context of cinema, over the years, hip-hop artists and scholars deconstructed this monolithic vision of masculinity, highlighting its role-playing performativity and conscious storytelling as opposed to traditional (i.e. Wasp) modes of representation. Not only does “gangsta rap” share tropes with other rap subgenres but, as Annette J. Saddik points out, it “has been the most misunderstood by the American public at large, the most easily targeted by political conservatives, and yet, is arguably the most ‘theatrical’ style of rap in terms of black masculine performativity within commodity capitalism and dominant power structures”.¹⁰

It followed that at best, the media, political and artistic debate opposed gangsta rappers (those interested in “girls, gold and guns”) with conscious Mc’s (whose lyrics aimed to raise awareness and social justice), often cementing on a dualist discursive framework over who — between West and East Coast rappers, N.W.A. and Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur and Nas — were the more “hardcore” or “black”.¹¹ “Why did a sub-style based on hustling, crime, sexual domination, and drug dealing”, Rose questions at the end of the 2000s, “become rap’s cultural and economic calling card, and thus the key icon for the hip-hop generation?”.¹²

To contribute to solving this dilemma, two mediators are worth to be re-considered: fashion and cinema. A monolithic association of hip-hop culture with machismo and hyper-sexuality, criminal behaviours and gangsterism, indeed, has often paired with an equally trivializing nexus to specific types of menswear. Take for instance the common interpretation of the rapper’s adoption of golden jewels and designer clothes as symbols of opulence and “street credibility”; of oversized clothing as a means to “hide drugs” [sic.], or of tattoos to flag gang membership; and, among others, of mafia-style fashion as a homage to the criminal world they, the rappers, came from.

Accordingly, Hollywood gangster and crime films depicting hyphened American mobsters, young hustle, street dealers and inner-city villains, have historically reinforced a racial semanticization between a social group and its supposedly way of dressing, as in the case of African and Italian American communities.¹³ As many influential hip-hop old and new schoolers started wearing, rhyming and acting like those characters, during the Reagan and Bush eras, the Us media assembled, image by image, a “ghettocentric” imagination which reunites under the same profitable flag criminal behaviour, urban decay and hip-hop culture.¹⁴ If the blaxploitation era favoured the popularization of the figure of the stylish “pimp”, the rise of new black cinema and the consequent film career of male rappers impersonating “thug boys” — among them Ice-T, Tupac Shakur and Ice Cube — marked a shift in the creation, negotiation and identification of a more advanced and counter-hegemonic vision of “blackness” within the hip-hop landscape, but hardened the idea, in the public opinion, that rappers and crews were representative of real gangsters and criminal families.

Therefore, hip-hop bodies and symbols were captured between two visual fetishisms,¹⁵ resulting in the perpetuation of disciplinary and oppressive policies toward “hip-hop fashion”. From the adoption of the NBA and NFL “dress code” in 2005 which denied league’s emerging stars dressing “hip-hop style” or “too hip-hop”,¹⁶ to the Chinese government which has recently banned from public television programs which feature actors with hip-hop clothes or related tattoos as considered decadent or not-aligned to the Party’s moral.¹⁷

Considering the long-lasting adoption of this discoursive frame surrounding the hip-hop world, my essay aims to contribute to cracking the dualist, monolithic and toxic “gangsterification” of hip-hop masculinity by discussing the complex and sensemaking “sampling” of the cinematic Italian menswear by the American hip-hop generation.¹⁸

Debating hip-hop’s fervent conversation with Italian film and fashion, my analysis focuses on the original and proactive employment of cinematic tropes in delivering a counter-narrative of hip-hop menswear and its associated masculinity, which, among many actors in the play, found a fervid site of application in Vibe magazine editorial line. Founded in 1992 by producers Quincy Jones and David Salzman in partnership with Time Inc., Vibe magazine is indeed considerably responsible for the diffusion of hip-hop Golden Age imagery thanks to its specific combination of high fashion and cinematic culture.¹⁹ In particular, Vibe’s fashion editors curated a series of photographic services with rap stars donning the biggest names in European and Italian couture and, as my recent perusal provides evidence, advertisements, reviews and photographic references to the Bel Paese and Made in Italy products exerted their presence in every issue of the magazine.

In doing so, I would reassess the lively role of the black and hip-hop community in undermining hegemonic discourse over them, along with their interplay with film and fashion culture in assembling Golden Age rap progressive masculine traits and hip-hop generation’s peculiar nexus with Italian modern style, or, in a broader sense, with hip-hop’s creative sampling of “Made in Italy”.

Hip-Hop Fashion and Made in Italy: Reknitting the “Sample”

If many fashion histories recognize the hip-hop’s remediation of European labels and its contribution to their continued relevance,²⁰ only a few have identified the cluster of elements associated with modern Italy underpinning these practices of “cultural transition”.²¹

As noted by Eugenia Paulicelli in her analysis of the cross-pollination between Gucci and black fashion designer Dapper Dan, what made Italian fashion particularly appealing to hip-hop stylists was the enduring cultural cachet that “Made in Italy” had developed in the United States. This also revealed a shared taste between Italians and black fashionistas.²² But how to retrace the formation of such a cultural prestige? And how can we grasp the connection between identifiable agencies acting as “local” or national brands (eg. Dan or Gucci) and others, such as hip-hop clothes or Italian films, operating on a wider and more suffuse transnational and intersectional scale? In his action-network theory, Bruno Latour suggests studying the formation of the intangible “cultural capital” supposed to operate above the human and non-human actors by retracing the specific sites — the “offices” — where this hypothetical capital was assembled and compiled, localized and connected to the whole.²³

Therefore, to take Latour literally, the first office which should be taken into account is that of Eunice W. Johnson, founder and director of the Ebony Fashion Fair (EFF) from 1958 to 2009.

Under the sponsorship of Ebony (the famed Us magazine for black readers whom Johnson was fashion editor), the EFF was a big annual runaway that toured dozens of American cities showing black male and female models wearing the top of European and American brands.²⁴ In a cutting-edge vision subsumed by the slogan “Back to Glamour”, Johnson was particularly attentive in putting at the leading of her initiative “French, Italian and Black American designers”.²⁵ As Johnson was portrayed in friendly chatting with famous Italian designer Emilio Schubert²⁶ (who also earned Ebony’s cover in October 1963), a deepen perusal of Ebony’s digital archive reveals that Jonhson was very active in authoring stories about Italian ready-to-wear and high couture.²⁷ In 1979, for instance, Johnson discussed the introduction of “furs” in black stars’ casual wear, which she believed challenged the old-fashioned stereotype of black machismo. Among many models, a picture of Jerome Barkum wearing a racoon fur by “Emilio Gucci” (an erroneous crasis between stylist “Emilio Pucci” and Gucci) stands out as a paradigmatic progressive encounter between black stardom and Italian fashion.²⁸ Shortly thereafter, following a new course in athleticwear, Ebony will review Italian swimsuits, tennis and jogging clothes showing black models in Fila and Ellesse fashionable “acetate” outfits in a time when Western sport brands were still building their image over white sports stars and models.²⁹

As I maintain, Ebony’s editorial focus on Italian couture stands as a prime site of the subsequent dialogue between Made in Italy and the hip-hop generation, which returns, with many commonalities, on Vibe magazine.

Italian Film, Hip-Hop Style: a Brief History of “Dress Connection”

Along with illustrated magazines, cinema played a crucial role in keeping connected Italian fashion with the Black and Latinx, and then hip-hop, community.³⁰

The second location where Italian “sampling potential” was discovered takes us to the American movie theatres and television screens, where previously overlooked films such as “old”, “foreign”, or “rated B” movies have become the most popular and easily accessible films for the hip-hop generation. Firstly, through good coverage on neighbourhood and grindhouse theatres (famed those on the block of Manhattan’s 42^nd street), which showed crime and action films at cut-rate ticket prices. Secondly thanks to their broadcasting on national TV, and the subsequent circulation on VCR/DVD, during the 1980s and 1990s.

As in the case of Martial arts films,³¹ for early hip-hop dancers the domestic visions of classic and technicoloured Hollywood musicals were a fundamental vehicle for developing spectacular moves and dance bravado.³² As street dance O.G. Mr Wiggles (Steffan Clemente) often remarks “old” musicals were still very popular among New York Black and Latinx teenagers of the 1970s, as many hip-hop foundational steps were literally “sampled” by those of the musical films aired on TV. MGM’s opulent musical, mostly directed by the Italian American Vincente Minnelli and starring Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and occasionally Frank Sinatra, was particularly influential in this sense, especially when they showed cross-racial performance numbers, acrobatic ground steps, and delivered a certain “taste” for the figure of the man who performs in a solid-colour suit.³³ If the cinematic suit negotiates “action-packed male spectacles” of vanity and violence, interior feelings and hard-boiled silhouettes,³⁴ focusing on this item as a cultural mediator would help in reknitting Italian film fashion to hip-hop across different genres and epochs.

Indeed, the iconic Fred Astaire’s outfit in Minnelli’s backstage musical The Band Wagon (1953) — an Italian-styled white suit, worn with a blue shirt, white tie and fedora curated by costume designer Mary Ann Nyberg — was proposed almost identically by Michael Jackson in his Smooth Criminal musical video (Chilvers, 1988), becoming one of his most iconic stage outfits.³⁵ As the video clip remakes Minnelli’s “Girl Hunt”, a famed chasing scene where Astaire runs into a glamorous speakeasy, notably Jackson’s screendance, as that of Astaire, plays on the capacity of beating enemies without corrupting the shiny integrity of the white suit.

Elected in 1995 by Bönz Malone as hip-hop’s “O.G.”, along with Astaire, Frank Sinatra provided another example of a cinematic-suited musical star, adding to the formula a specific “renegade masculinity”.³⁶ John Gennari aptly discusses the role of Sinatra as neuralgic centre for the vibrant exchange between Italian Americans and African Americans in the Us entertainment system.³⁷ In particular, different films and TV shows starring The Rat Pack — Sinatra’s famed crossracial ensemble which includes Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin — portrayed a prismatic vision of The Voice which echoes in many tropes surrounding hip-hop masculinity and menswear: from his rise-to-the-top narrative to the “’air of stylish menace” he maintained once he got there.³⁸ According to Susan Nanes, Frank Sinatra embodied a unique form of masculinity that was not dominated by any particular ethnic group. He navigated between the processes of de-masculinization and re-masculinization, all while remaining connected to both the world of organized crime and the world of classic male fashion.³⁹ This is particularly epitomized in Sinatra’s last self-produced musical, Robin and the Seven Hoods (Douglas, 1964), a parody of classic gangster movies and a romanticized recapitulation of Sinatra’s rise to the top in the guise of an all-green suited Robin Hood. As for The Band Wagon, the film combines multiple “gangster-styled” performance numbers, displaying a colourful flamboyant wardrobe curated by costume designer Donfeld. If Davis Jr’s solo was accounted by Wiggles as one of his favourites,⁴⁰ in a performance number over the song Style, Sinatra and Martin teach Bing Crosby how to add class to his dress by “tilting the hat”, a practice in common with 1970s street hustlers and then early street dancers. Intriguingly a photo from the early 1980s depicts the teenage members of the break dance group Rock Steady Crew with outfits reminiscent of Sinatra’s film, giving a hint of the prismatic “fashion connections” that the hip-hop community re-knit during the years of hip-hop’s first mainstreaming (Fig. 1)

Approaching the 1980s, Tony Manero’s white three-piece suit in Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977) brought by costume designer Patrizia Von Bernstein in a boutique in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge, resurfaces as an iconic gear for the hip-hop generation. Fever portrays a NY Italian American teenage disco dancer who shares many affinities with the figure of the “b-boy” (his obsession for practice and battling, his admiration for Al Pacino and Bruce Lee, but also his homosocial and homophobic behaviours, and his struggle with interior sensibility and exterior bravado). Additionally, Travolta’s white-suited screendance results from an intriguing mix of street dance and studio dance, which helps in revamping disco culture, but also cracking racial barriers.⁴¹ The Mighty Zulu Kingz leader and old-school Bronx b-boy Alien Ness (Luis Martinez) describes Tony’s solo dance scene on Bee Gee’s You Should Be Dancing, as crucial for his dance career:

The thing about that solo is when he stepped out and open up the dance floor […] everybody stops dancing and look at the dancefloor and watch him, and I just thought that power. To me it was power, you know, and he was in a “zone”, you know what I’m saying? I thought it was super-dope. And then it was what start me dancing-dancing, not breaking dancing. After I started breaking I’ve actually got to me Daney Terrio who was the choreographer for that movie and the story he told me about, you know, teaching John Travolta, especially that scene cause I’ve told you that scene inspired me, made it more special to me.⁴²

Notably, Terrio worked for Fever as a dance coach but wasn’t credited. Along with the reevaluation of his contribution, the figure of Terrio is particularly interesting in terms of actor-networking since he also worked with Frank Sinatra and The Lockers, a groundbreaking locking dance crew from Los Angeles from whom he arguably learnt the “Scooby Doo” step that Travolta executes during the solo. In a closing circle, while the suited Astaire and the Rat Pack provided sampling moves for two generations of street dancers, at the end of the 1970s street dance had already influenced Hollywood screen dance, which lately will incorporate break dance “battle moves” in a new era of urban-pop musicals such as Flashdance,(Lyne, 1983), Breakin’, Fast Forward (Poitier, 1985) and later in the cycle of urban dance movies of the 2000–2010s.

Mafia Movies: the Godfathers of Style

If the fashion style of the saddled black gunslinger distinguished from that of the shiny white-suited musical dancer, that of “The Godfather” — in the form of the Italian American mobster and, later, of the “black gangster”⁵⁷ — sublimates the twos. Journalist and black gay/queer activist Emil Wilbekin rises out for being one of the few voices to propose a connection between Hollywood gangster fashion and the sampling of Italian high-fashion clothing in the heyday of the gangsta rap era:

With literal references, these rappers traded in their gang-inspired, dark denim prison gear and crew-related bandannas for expensive, double-breasted suits, silk shirts, and bowler hats which — with the growth of the Italian menswear scene among designers like Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Gianfranco Ferré — were becoming popular on the high-fashion circuit. Mike Tyson bouts in Las Vegas were packed with hip hop heads all sporting brightly printed silk shirts by Gianni Versace and puffing on Cuban cigars.⁵⁸

Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the relationship between Italian fashion and hip-hop style goes beyond the classic gangster films from the 1930s. Instead, this connection was facilitated by a specific intermediary in the form of New Hollywood’s Italian American gangster movies, which gained popularity on American screens. With a centre of cultural gravity in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather saga (1972–1990)⁵⁹ spanning titles such as Scarface (De Palma, 1983), Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, 1984), The Untouchables (De Palma, 1987), Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990), A Bronx Tale (De Niro, 1993), and King of New York (Ferrara, 1990), post-classical gangster movies authored by and/or representative of Italians or Italian Americans, were oversampled by the hip-hop generation in terms of lyrics, gestures, vocabulary and, mostly, fashion.⁶⁰

In respect of classical noir and gangster films Wilbekin refers to, Italo-made mafia movies and novels of the 1970s proposed a romanticization of the mafioso as a Promethean defensor of the “good old values” of patriarchal manhood, then shifting in the 1980s to a more crude and psychopathological portrayal of contemporary urban “mafia life”.⁶¹ Both the models provide fashion narratives which were highly sampled by Black and Latinx breakers and rappers. From New York breakers donning tilted “coppola hat” reminiscent of the one worn by Mike Corleone (Al Pacino) in the picturesque Sicily of the Part I; to Cold Crush Brothers, Notorious Big (Fig. 2) and Slick Rick wearing white three-piece suits in their live concerts and photoshoots resembling Don Fanucci’s attire styled by Gastone Moschin in the Part II; up to Run-DMC “Godfather hat” as a key component of one of the most distinctive looks of hip-hop’s Golden age rap. As I’ve discussed, arguably hip-hop heads sampled those gears for they “embody” a cinematic discourse, including their “Italianness”, which gave their adoption a total “inclusive” value.⁶²

Of course, the combination of Rat Pack’s flamboyant style and gangster attitude (subsumed in Sinatra’s look as Robbo) and the Godfatheresque fashion narrative was already retractable in the black street hustler style of the 1970s. This trend intertwined with the popularization of the “super bad” masculinity of the blaxploitation films,⁶³ and even before with the black dandyism and the “zoot-suitors” tradition of “styling out”.⁶⁴ Since 1971 famed retailer for black consumers Flagg Bros promoted their fancy outfits over the look of black cinematic hustlers pictured in films like Shaft (Parks, 1971) and Superfly (Parks Jr., 1972), advertising multiple Italian-style white suites, alligator-skin shoes and fedoras, also called “The Godfather hat” (the promotion of whom were also abundant on Ebony).

It is now acknowledged that back then, black dressmaker Dan “Dapper Dan” Day followed this fashion trend in his Harlem boutique until a young LL Cool J stepped into his door looking for a fly dress to fit with his “new” image of rap star.⁶⁵ Cool J, and soon other NY male and female rappers, gave impulse to Day for enterprising a new approach to couture as he started sampling European high-end models and monographs into urban and street clothing, giving to a new generation of male and female rap stars a look quite different from that displayed by Cool J in the cover book I mentioned in the incipit. During the 1980s and 1990s black stylists such as Dapper Dan and Mysa Hilton, original fashion designers like the Shirt Kings, Carl Jones of Cross Colours, Karl Kani and Mark Echo, hip-hop trendsetters like Run-DMC and Salt-N-Pepa, Notorious BIG and Lil’ Kim, sampled both the gangsta/street and the European couture imageries to craft a distinctive hip-hop visual style.⁶⁶ Along with that, all participate in canonizing a new form of dressing which nowadays is considered “hip-hop fashion” but, around 1994, was identified by the insiders as “Ghetto Fabulous”. As Wilbekin remarks:

The style was based on high-end designer clothing like Versace, Giorgio Armani, Prada, Fendi, and Dolce & Gabbana — but this was no runway look, baby. The suits were worn like the jeans, big and baggy. Italian designers make beautifully tailored suits and extravagant luxury items, and hip hop appropriated those labels, still wearing them with true ghetto grit.⁶⁷

And at a time when hip-hop was establishing its aesthetic and look, Emil Wilbekin worked as chief stylist for Vibe, aiming to connect with (and give a voice to) the “new” black audience who might not be as interested in the services of Ebony as their parents were.

Italian Fashion Meets the Streets: the Case of Vibe Magazine (1992–1997)

On September 2023 I conducted a specific perusal of Vibe magazine at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, looking for elements reconducible to Italian culture. The investigation covered 34 volumes, from Vibe’s preview number in Fall 1992 to the first volume of January 1997, and resulted in 148 records including advertisements, photographs and articles which make an explicit and relevant reference to Italian subjects (brands, people, stories, films and goods).⁶⁸ Realigning those items into a digital spreadsheet unveiled an intriguing network between Italian and hip-hop actors which were scarcely spotted or discussed by hip-hop and fashion scholars. In particular, firms such as Armani (Exchange and Emporio line), Versace (Jeans line and Versus perfume),⁶⁹ Mauri, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Moschino and, for the sportswear, Fila, were quite omnipresent on Vibe’s pages.⁷⁰

In a period where only a few American brands and designers deliberately embraced the nascent “urban style”, these Italian brands invested in hip-hop readers with full-page promotion of their goods (in particular clothes, shoes and occasionally perfumes), while Vibe spotlighted multiple Made in Italy dresses and gears in its fashion columns and photoshoots.⁷¹ In both cases, I recognize a progressive adaptation toward the hip-hop/black taste which resulted in marketing contents more akin to the urban style and, as I’ll discuss, in lingering on their aesthetical affinity to cinematic imagery, in particular to gangster movies and westerns.

With an editorial staff of young contributors (most of whom were black people in their 20s) fashion photographers in their early careers such as George Holz, Guy Aroch, and the Italian Australian Daniela Federici, tied up with Vibe’s resident stylists Emil Wilbekin, Derick Procope and Phillip Bloch, creating a specific editorial line which made the magazine stand out from other competitors devoted entirely to hip-hop culture such as The Source (1988–), Hip-hop Connection (1988–2009) or XXL (1997–).

Here the figure of the fashion stylist emerges as a key “mediator”. As for Latour’s metaphor of the “office”, it is useful to take the motif of the mediator literally since the stylist was the person who actively mediated between the client and different professional figures (photographers, editors, artists) in order to create, as Wilbekin maintains, “the aspirational look and feel of fashion and style for the masses”.⁷² This role, Wilbekin reflects, was central for Hollywood executives aimed at reinventing star personas in the studio system era, and regained centrality on Vibe’s stylism by spreading new hip-hop looks through “vintage film references” and “archival fashion imageries”.⁷³ To do so, Vibe’s trademark resided in an original combination of Vogue’s fashion glamour and Rolling Stone’s devotion to pop music:

Inside the magazine, stylist Phillip Bloch took brands like Emporio Armani and emboldened them, making them feel culturally relevant to the streets and high fashion at the same time. Supermodel Naomi Campbell posed in a photo spread wearing Gianni Versace’s designs embellished with the brand’s hallmark sexy bondage references and romantic Italian Baroque prints. Vibe understood the amalgamation of hood style and high-end fashion and the art of the remix that created a cultural conversation, focusing the spotlight on hip hop: the revolutionary resilience of the Black community and the renaissance of rap.⁷⁴

In these lines Wilbekin seems to reassess the existence of an Italian network sustaining Vibe’s mission. Evoking two important Italian brands such as Armani and Versace (as a continuator of Italian “baroquism”) Wilbekin informs on the conscious employment of Italian signs in promoting what he elegantly subsumed as Vibe’s formula of hip-hop fashion: an “amalgamation of hood style and high-end fashion and the art of remix”. Additionally, the references to Phillip Bloch (one of the most influential stylists of Hollywood black stars) and to Naomi Campbell (whose supposedly love affair with Robert De Niro was revealed in the issue) also expose Vibe’s nexus with the Italian cinematic milieu.⁷⁵

Opening the issue with an interview about LL Cool J’s career as a new Hollywood actor,⁷⁶ Vibe, indeed, regularly hosted interviews and film ads which put the spotlight on the rise of black cinema and its connection with Italy. Additionally, the preview number also places an article on “Dialogica”, a duo of contemporary furniture designers composed by the Italian Sergio Savarese and his wife Monique, who was accounted for designing pieces of furniture both for black film and music stars.⁷⁷ Later on, Bönz Malone reinforces the interplayed fascination for Italian film and fashion to his readers with four articles.⁷⁸ In a two-part story titled “La dolce B-zo” Malone recounts his voyage to Italy as a perfect, peaceful place for a black man like him for a “reevaluation of life and style” where an atmosphere reminiscent to that of La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960) pervaded his description of Italy.⁷⁹ While action films with Italian/African American couples like Demolition Man (Brambilla, 1993) with Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone or White Men’s Burden (Nakano, 1995) starring John Travolta and Henry Belafonte were highly advertised,⁸⁰ in an article on Spike Lee the figures of Italian Americans actors Danny Aiello and Giancarlo Esposito, who interpreted two of the main characters of Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), were described as part of Lee’s “extended family”.⁸¹ Occasionally, Vibe also peeks into “bizarre” chronicles highlighting the Italian non-pacified love for “blackness”.⁸² The most emblematic cases include a story on Italian beloved black soccer player, the Dutch-Surinamese Rudd Gullit, who was asked to come back to AC Milan by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (who, in the while, had “joined a neo-Fascist coalition that includes Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter”).⁸³ Or with a “point-blank news” about Denny Mendez, the first black girl to be elected “Miss Italy”, who in 1996 sparked a public debate over race and national identity.⁸⁴

Other relevant stories cover the emerging career of Giovanni Salah, an Italian-African American rapper who costarred with Dough E Fresh in Let’s Get Bizzee (Clay, 1993) providing a “fusion of street-smart charisma and bohemian-artist flavor”,⁸⁵ and Articolo 31, the first Italian rap group to go platinum in 1996, who had recently shot their music video in Little Italy, “of course”.⁸⁶

On the issue of April 1996, then, the magazine dedicated a full-page article to The Vibe Experience, an unprecedented “men’s fashion show” and hip-hop jam organized by Vibe at Magazzini Generali event hall in Milan. Here hip-hop stars like Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, and Shaggy, plus Vibe’s executives and intermediaries, hung out with Giorgio Armani, Donatella Versace, and art director Nando Miglio in a gigantic event which attracted more than 3,000 fashionable guests (Fig. 3).⁸⁷

In terms of “vintage film references”, as anticipated, Vibe intercepted the imagination of Italian Westerns and the black cowboys with a multipage fashion service styled by Derrick Procope on November 1995. Showing black male models wearing “western-inspired” clothing by Italian brands such as Armani, D&G and Pepe, the cinematic style adopted by the photographer Dina Shultz seems reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, with a particular shot that appears as a direct reference to the first long shot of Woody Strode in Leone’s film (Fig. 4; Fig. 5).⁸⁸ Another shot portrays a black cowboy in an all-black outfit lingering on the saddle which reminisces the scene of the same film when the villain Frank (Henry Fonda) falls after Harmonica (Charles Bronson) shoots him to death. In general, the photographic style, which privileges warm colours and overexposition aligns with Tonino Delli Colli’s (Leone’s cinematographer) visual style and sense of suspension. Reference to black gunslingers returns in the LP ads for Ronnie Laws’ Natural Laws⁸⁹ and Sadat X’s Wild Cowboys,⁹⁰ along with the aforementioned article by David Bry on hip-hop’s aesthetical linkage with the Wild West.

Many of Vibe’s services, as well, linger on the cinematic imagery of mafia movies and its associated fashion. As anticipated, in “O.G. Frank Sinatra didn’t take orders: he took over”, Malone elects The Voice as the truly hip-hop “Original Gangster” retracing similarities in fashion and attitude with Italian American mafiosi such as Al Capone and John Gotti, and by insisting on Sinatra’s connection with black culture, delving into his friendship with Quincy Jones and Sammy Davis Jr.⁹¹

A page after Malone’s tribute to Sinatra, a column draws a parallel with the adult film Powertool (1986) for enlisting fashion garments as the “lethal weapons” that define important hip-hop and stardom figures. Gears displayed include a black homburg hat (simply called “fedora”) as iconic “weapons” both for “Capone” and “Malcolm X” and Fila’s Grant Hill sneakers whose commercial success (over $42,5 million in 9 years) make Vibe exclaim “that’s Juice”.⁹² “Juice” was a term which recurred over the volumes as Vibe tried to define its significance in the hip-hop vocabulary. To have or be “juice” means exercising authority effortlessly or without using violence, but also doing something thug with style and finesse. A concept which overlaps with the notions of Italian “sprezzatura” and “bella figura” about the solid-colour suited man and his associated masculinity.

Among a variety of works, “Film noir” stands out as an intriguing 1996 service shooted by Guy Aroch and styled by Wilbekin which portrayed black rappers in famous Hitchcock’s films scenario. “Hip-hop and R&B — like all Alfred Hitchcock’s films — are filled with thrills, chills, and romance. So who better act out scenes from famous Hitchcock flicks than a cast of urban music superstars?”.⁹³ With a long cigar on his mouth, Biggie was portrayed in a iconic hitchcockian silhouette as he, like the British director, likes making cameo “in everybody’s else single”.⁹⁴ Sadat X appears in an all-navy blue Versace wool suit while running away from a manacious plane resembling the equally iconic look of Cary Grant in North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1954) (Fig. 6). And again, a few pages later, the issue presents another service titled “Dressed for Success”, where Daniela Federici exalted famous Motown rappers styled by Procope in elegant Italian black and white outfits by Armani, D&G and Spadafora, with the explicit intent to relaunch the label’s new image.⁹⁵

Outro

Unveiling a fervent Italian/hip-hop connection spanning film, fashion and publishing, that of the “stylist” emerges as a key mediator for diffusing an alternative vision of hip-hop fashion and masculinity. In particular, the mediating figure of Emil Wilbekin stands out as a crucial mediator of this cross-pollinating network. Firstly, for his role of stylist-in-chief of Vibe during the hip-hop Golden age. Secondly for his contribution to historicizing the Italian presence in hip-hop fashion. Thirdly for his commitment as hip-hop entrepreneur and black gay/queer activist. As Wilbekin notes, at the time the only American designer who explicitly embraced hip-hop was Tommy Hilfiger, while other power brands such as Polo, Calvin Klein, Nautica and Timberland feared their association with the “hardcore urban attitude”.⁹⁶ As my research has started to dig out, however, there is evidence that designers such as Gianni and Donatella Versace, Giorgio Armani, Mauri, and Italian sportswear brands such as Fila and Ellesse, as well, have embraced the American hip-hop culture and — not without failures, frictions and backwards — were transformed by it. Additionally, the sampling potential of such firms by the hip-hop generation delves into the Italian cinematic culture which, concerning Hollywood Wasp-oriented narrative, facilitates the spinning of an intricate tapestry involving black masculinity, Italian stylism, new urban wear and street cinéphilia. In particular, if “gangsta rap” identifies a role-playing performance instead of a real adherence to a criminal lifestyle, certainly mafia movies offer a privileged and fashionable setting to be sampled. This should be the way to interpret Wu-Tang Clan’s habit of re-watching The Godfather or Once Upon a Time in America in order to “model” their personality and lyrical “cadence” over these cinematic storyworlds.⁹⁷

Reading Vibe’s pages almost three decades from their publication reveals a portrayal of hip-hop masculinity which looks far away — or strives to astray from — the stereotyped model of the “financially profitable but socially destructive images” of black rappers that have dominated hip-hop visual culture of the 1990s-2000s.⁹⁸ The picture gets gladly complicated if we think that this type of masculinity was also negotiated by gay/queer subjectivities who, concerning the traditional hip-hop vs. disco divide, have been excluded from the cis-normative history of hip-hop for too many years.⁹⁹

By acknowledging the important contributions to hip-hop cultural history of figures like that of Emil Wilbekin, we can work to redress these historical imbalances and create a more inclusive and accurate narrative sustaining the emergence of the double h culture and its global spreading. Within this framework, hip-hop culture and its associated fashion actively participate in the ongoing opening/closure process which characterizes masculinity in contemporary media scenario, generating forms of “personalized” or “inclusive” masculinity that contrast with the traditional hypermasculine ideal and reject the supposed need of restoring patriarchal manhood.¹⁰⁰ Moreover, the reconnection with Italian culture, far from being an attempt to downsize the Black and Latinx roots of hip-hop, could inform future research not only on Italian endemic cross- and poly-cultural identity but also toward a more intersectional and transnational approach on the study of hip-hop culture.¹⁰¹

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Webography

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