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Dialogues@RU is published
annually by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey

Volume Two
Spring 2003

In our society today, pursuits to conform or adjust to the ever-altering trends that dictate the fashion landscape are priorities for any fashion or pop-culture connoisseur. For better or for worse, the fate of consumer America is predicated on the domineering shadow of adolescent acquisition, and even more on producers capitalizing off the individuality that consumers hope to achieve. In hip-hop culture, where lavishness and extreme excess is a requirement at times, designer and name-brand fashions have found a niche in the urban ethos catalog. Throughout its rich and relatively young history, hip-hop's standard dress has undergone many modifications. However, one of the most essential and enduring hip-hop staples has been footwear. According to Rebecca Arnold's Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century , the cultures of feet and fashion have been negotiating for years, footwear first appearing as a necessary accessory during the 1980s when groups like Run-DMC made songs such as "My Adidas" to promote their undying love for "kicks" (Arnold 40). Fast-forward to 2002, and the marriage between shoes and hip-hop is still very much evident. Popular brands such as Nike, Reebok, and the ubiquitous Jordan brand are some of the most widely consumed and hip-hop endorsed products on the market. However, as of last year, a new phenomenon has taken the urban shoe market by storm, and reinvented the image of what it means to be "ghetto fabulous." The phenomenon we are speaking of, my friends, is the personalized shoe. First introduced through lyrics and now visually in music videos by rappers such as Jadakiss and Cam'ron, customized footwear has become the next popular trend among youth, and in many respects it is reminiscent of the Dapper Dan explosion of the 80s, when, according to Nelson George's Hip Hop America , street aficionados stitched the logos of name brands into regular articles of clothing and passed them off as authentic. The personalized shoe, which bleeds through similar veins as its predecessor, is a more modern spectacle, combining shoes and boots with the fabric and monograms of top designer brands such as Gucci, Christian Dior, and Louis Vuitton (Lewis 2E). In "Be our Brand: Fashion and Personalization on the Web," Susan Berry introduces to us the concept of "personalization," which, quoting from Jean Baudrillard's The System of Objects , is proclaimed to be "an interaction between the personality of the individual and the so called 'personality' of the product itself" (Berry 19). This concept becomes quite practical when correlated to hip-hop youth culture's infatuation with customized footwear, since it is in some respects an expression of creativity and a divergence from generic styles. More than just a form of self-expression and individuality, customized footwear has also matured into a representation of a latent social message. According to Arnold, hip-hop fashion came into the fashion industry through a term she describes as "slumming," which "represented a form of rebellion against designer dictates of style and 'good' taste epitomized in . . . conservative tailoring" (32). It is interesting to note now that this same "slumming," or anti-preppy aura, that hip-hop culture revolves around has been culturally replicated today in the form of customized footwear, which not only signifies consumer creativity and personalization, but also in some sense a rebellion against the upper echelon of top flight designers who shunned and looked at hip-hop as no more than a fad, and a relative long shot to have an impact on the consumer market. These social disruptions and the consumerist thirsts of "Wannabe Hood Donald Trumps" are dissected accurately in Peter Stearns's " The First Causes of Consumerism " where the writer explains that since the development of the working classes, clothing has served as "badges of identity" in a rapidly changing social climate that uses consumerism as a means of "countering unfavorable changes or blurrings to social status" (30-1).

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