The revolution in our pants: Hipsters, race and American fashion

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the contemporary jogger pant by looking back to the mid-twentieth-century coding of hipness through material consumption, racial mastery and urbanity, primarily through Malcolm X’s musing on zoot suits, but also attending to adjacent literary texts: Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem ‘We Real Cool’ and Norman Mailer’s essay ‘The white negro: Superficial reflections on the hipster’. It finally returns to the present day to read the contemporary jogger alongside the midcentury zoot suit, gesturing to ways in which hipster appropriation is both problematic, because it assumes as authentic cultural products of whiteness that actually borrow from blackness, and full of potential, because in even quietly citing its borrowing of black and feminine forms, it may serve to destabilize white masculinity.