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Kathy Peiss - Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

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Kathy Peiss Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style
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ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit.
Cab Calloway, The Hepsters Dictionary, 1944

Before the fashion statements of hippies, punks, or hip-hop, there was the zoot suit, a striking urban look of the World War II era that captivated the imagination. Created by poor African American men and obscure tailors, the drape shape was embraced by Mexican American pachucos, working-class youth, entertainers, and swing dancers, yet condemned by the U.S. government as wasteful and unpatriotic in a time of war. The fashion became notorious when it appeared to trigger violence and disorder in Los Angeles in 1943events forever known as the zoot suit riot. In its wake, social scientists, psychiatrists, journalists, and politicians all tried to explain the riddle of the zoot suit, transforming it into a multifaceted symbol: to some, a sign of social deviance and psychological disturbance, to others, a gesture of resistance against racial prejudice and discrimination. As controversy swirled at home, young men in other placesFrench zazous, South African tsotsi, Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagimade the American zoot suit their own.

In Zoot Suit, historian Kathy Peiss explores this extreme fashion and its mysterious career during World War II and after, as it spread from Harlem across the United States and around the world. She traces the unfolding history of this style and its importance to the youth who adopted it as their uniform, and at the same time considers the way public figures, experts, political activists, and historians have interpreted it. This outr style was a turning point in the way we understand the meaning of clothing as an expression of social conditions and power relations. Zoot Suit offers a new perspective on youth culture and the politics of style, tracing the seam between fashion and social action.

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Zoot Suit
Zoot Suit
Zoot Suit The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style - image 1
THE ENIGMATIC CAREER
OF AN EXTREME STYLE
KATHY PEISS
Copyright 2011 Kathy Peiss All rights reserved Except for brief quotations - photo 2
Copyright 2011 Kathy Peiss
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peiss, Kathy.
Zoot suit: the enigmatic career of an extreme style / Kathy Peiss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-8122-4337-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Clothing and dressSocial aspectsUnited States. 2. FashionUnited StatesHistory20th century. 3. Minority youthUnited StatesSocial life and customs20th century. I. Title.
GT525 .P45 2011
391.10973dc22 2011010284
In Memory of Susan Porter Benson
As soon as this man caught sight of her, he began to look himself over. Starting at the bottom with his pointed shoes, he began to look up, lifting his peg-top pants the higher to see fully his bright socks. His coat, long and wide and leaf-green, he opened like doors to see his high-up tawny pants, and his pants he smoothed downward from the points of his collar, and he wore a luminous baby-pink satin shirt. At the end, he reached gently above his wide platter-shaped round hat, the color of a plum, and one finger touched at the feather, emerald green, blowing in the spring winds.
EUDORA WELTY, LIVVIE IS BACK, 1942
We were unable to find any one thing that started this rage or where it originated.
FRANK WALTON, THREAD OF VICTORY, 1945
Perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning, perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy Hop conceals clues to great potential powerif only Negro leaders would solve this riddle.
RALPH ELLISON, NEGRO QUARTERLY, 1943
A key chain six times too long is just long enough to hold NO keys.
LANGSTON HUGHES, CHICAGO DEFENDER, 1943
It is a symptom of profound weakness in our American civilization.
AGNES E. MEYER, WASHINGTON POST, 1943
ZOOT (adj.): exaggerated.
ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit.
CAB CALLOWAY, THE HEPSTERS DICTIONARY, 1944
CONTENTS
Zoot Suit The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style - image 3
INTRODUCTION
Zoot Suit The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style - image 4
In June 1943, in the midst of World War II, the city of Los Angeles erupted in violence. White sailors and soldiers, egged on by Anglo civilians, stopped streetcars and invaded movie theaters in search of young Mexican American menknown as pachucosbeating them, tearing their jackets, and stripping them of their trousers. With newspapers and radio adding fuel to the fire, the mayhem continued for more than a week. As some Mexican American youths fought back, the navy finally put the city off limits for shore leave, and the police appeared in forcearresting these young people as troublemakers, delinquents, and rioters. No one was killed, but more than a hundred individuals landed in the hospital with serious injuries. When the riot ended, investigators and journalists spun out numerous explanations for what had occurred. Many Anglos asserted that Hispanic youth were inherently violent and criminal, while liberal voices and the African American press charged racial discrimination, magnified by wartime tensions over inadequate housing, the lack of jobs, and segregated recreational facilities. Some saw the influence of Communism guiding the riot, and others perceived the frightening presence of a fascist Fifth Column.
In the weeks and months after the Los Angeles riot, racial conflict and urban conflagration swept across the American home front, in such places as Beaumont, Texas, New York City, and Detroit, leaving death, destruction, and heightened enmity in their wake. Only in Los Angeles, however, did a style of dress become the focal point of unrest or figure prominently in the response. Most participants and observers did not refer to it as a race riot, and even fewer saw it as servicemens vigilantism. Rather, the unrest became enshrined as the zoot suit riot, perhaps the only time in American history that fashion was believed to be the cause of widespread civil unrest.
Zoot, says Cab Calloways Hepsters Dictionary, means something done or worn in an exaggerated style: the long killer-diller coat with a drape shape and wide shoulders; pants with reet-pleats, billowing out at the knees, tightly tapered and pegged at the ankles; a porkpie or wide-brimmed hat; pointed or thick-soled shoes; and a long, dangling keychain. This was a striking urban look of the 1940sa street style created by African Americans that extended conventional menswear to the point of caricature. The zoot suit was associated with racial and ethnic minorities and working-class youth, celebrated in the world of jitterbug, jive, and swing, and condemned by government authorities seeking to conserve precious textiles for the war effort. It was a style that sparked the imagination, whether as an object of fear or admiration. Where had it come from? What did it mean? Why did it evoke such visceral reactions? In the wake of the riot, journalists, social workers, psychiatrists, and police officers scrambled to comprehend the phenomenon, trying to fix its meaning within recognizable frameworks of social science, psychology, and common sense.
Despite these efforts, the zoot suit, and the circumstances in which it was worn, had a bewildering strangeness that no one could quite explain. Frank Walton, who directed the governments wartime effort to conserve textiles and clothing, simply shook his head: Many attempts have been made to analyze the idea and to see just what caused it and what was behind it but so far there is no good answer. Months before the Los Angeles riot, Ralph Ellison pointed to the zoot suit as one of many myths and symbols which abound among the Negro masses and offered clues to the state of black America, a puzzle the political class needed to decipher. Living in Los Angeles during the war, writer Octavio Paz pondered the style of Mexican American youth in the United States, whose whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions,
Over the years, the extreme style of the zoot suit has continued to resonate. It inspired the swing youth in 1940s Europe, attracted to the unusual dress, jazz music, and jitterbug dancing associated with American popular culture; French zazous wore elements of the style in defiance of the German Occupation. After the war, the zoot suit became a hallmark of black South African youths known as tsotsis, who integrated it into their gang and street life. Young men in Russia called
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