Streetwear: Dating Back To The Hippie Movement

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Streetwear. People can probably guess that streetwear gets its name because it's what you wear on the street. But streetwear is a fashion style centered around needlessly expensive and exclusive clothes with bold, risky graphics, strange silhouettes, messy but put together outfits, skater culture, and dystopic inspired fashion. Dating back to the hippie movement, streetwear was influenced by the hippie style was one of the trends of the alternative “streetwear”. Influenced by political conflicts and music, hippies expressed themselves through what they wore, and sometimes what they did not wear. Similarly to the hippie movement, political issues led to the formation of punk music, which led to the invention of an aggressive style

I am of course talking about the punk rockers in the United States in the 70s who followed the hippie movement. Like the hippie movement the punk movement advocated nonconformist, anti-war, and anti-corporate sentiments. However, the similarities end there, for the punk movement was not against being violent to express their actions. As a result the punk movement generated a lot of people whom were referred to as “hoodlums”, “gangsters”, “ruffians”, and other terms that had connotations of general violence and delinquency (No Future). Generally speaking, the people of the early punk movement wanted to look as tough and as different as society as possible. They adopted trashed clothes from hippie, and instead of embroidering symbols of peace onto their clothes, they would add bold designs - often with political and violent connotations. Whether they sow an upside down cross, the symbol for anarchy7, or just regular studs, the punk rock movement was the polar opposite in how they came across when compared to hippies. The punk movement manifested itself and split off into metalheads and grunge kids, while still remaining as “punk” then splitting off into a bunch of into smaller different punk inspired movements, like all the goths and emos in the world. Now, people take the edgier bits of the

Like any form of art and self-expression each person are going to have a different idea, and that will be expressed in their fits. Streetwear itself originated from the alternative movements like hippies and skaters because the name streetwear implies what you would see on the streets, and these two groups of people were not exactly contributing members of society, thus you would see them on the streets. People starting calling any outlandish style they couldn’t categorize into a single category as “streetwear” and the name has stuck ever since. People in the know with streetwear understand the influences in their style. Kanye took a dystopian theme, the hippies took the theme of peace, punk rockers show their aggressive nature through their aggressive clothes, Kurt Cobain expresses himself through both his style and his music, and the skaters announce their skater-ness by dressing the way they do. We as a society have begun to label these groups and similar alternative groups by the way they dress so we have an easier time with the categorization of these