![]() ![]() The suit’s rise in popularity coincided with the emergence of the jitterbug and other forms of swing dance music. Typically they would buy them at local clothing shops and have them tailored to this oversized style.” “Mexican-American and white working-class men also would wear them. “They were generally worn by young men of African-American descent, initially,” Peiss says. Although its exact origin is unknown, the term “zoot suit” appears to have come from the rhyming slang, or jive, spoken in the African-American community at the time, Peiss says. Peiss traces the creation of the zoot suit to Harlem in the mid to late 1930s, when tailors began making them out of wool or colorful varieties of rayon. The zoot suit should not be looked at solely as a costume that conveys political resistance.” “It had many different meanings, including the pleasure of looking sharp and being part of a group of young people in the war years. “I argue that people it for a whole range of reasons,” she says. Nichols Professor of American History in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, examines the fashion phenomenon that became so politically polarizing it played a part in sparking a vicious uprising in California, known as the Zoot Suit Riots. That’s one of questions Kathy Peiss explores in her new book, “Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style.” In the book, Peiss, the Roy F. But what statement were those who were donning the look in the late 1930s and early 1940s trying to make? With jacket arms that reached the fingertips and pants worn tight at the waist, bulging at the knees and choked at the ankles, it was nearly impossible to ignore a man wearing a zoot suit.Īccessorized with a key chain that extended to the knees and a fedora-like hat with a feather attached, the fashion certainly said something about those who sported it. ![]()
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