Fresh Dressed review: a most excellent history of hip-hop style

To heck with that glum, blonde Bond: the award for this week’s liveliest film goes - hands down - to this madly entertaining history of hip-hop style.

It’s only right and proper that Sacha Jenkins’ film has many flavours: academic Todd Boyd is on hand to recount to trace the term ‘Sunday Best’ back to slave-owners and note the Christian influence on African-American style; various rappers-turned-fashion-moguls – P. Diddy, Kanye West – pop up to discuss their brands; we learn how to fatten laces with starch so that we too, might sport our sneakers fresh.

Fresh Dressed's swaggering chronicle kicks off in the late 1960s, at a moment when Brooklyn was the arson capital of the world and when gangs customised their jean jackets in tribute to Easy Rider. In the wake of the death of peacemaker Cornell Benjamin, the gangs called a truce, wherein rivals learned to confront each other with mics and turntables and dance moves. This new sub-culture required a new style. Classic B-Boys and B-Girls wore Cazal glasses and Kangols. Mel E Mel went large with crazy jackets and cowboy boots.

After a rocky start, African-American fashion imprints began to be taken seriously and new houses – notably Cross Colours and Karl Kani - began to emerge as global brands.

Jenkins’ film is never explicitly judgemental, but it does point us toward the ideological switcheroo that governs all fashion: the hip-hop flavours that were once handmade expressions of individualism have been subsequently plundered, mass-produced and sold on as “expressions of individualism”. Not entirely unlike the music, then.

P. Diddy, whose successful Sean John label has helped push him toward a net worth of $735 million, says many of the same things as other rappers-turned-brand-managers: it’s not the clothes, “it’s a lifestyle”.

Maybe. But Fresh Dressed brings it all back to the street, where one feels the culture rightly belongs.