Menace After a Fashion, in a Culture That Glamorizes Gangsters

My neighbor is worried. The good news is that her son has a summer job in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. The bad news is that, like virtually all the boys in his suburban community, he likes to wear baggy pants. So his mother has laid down the law: No baggy pants this summer, at least not at work where, she fears, such garb might be misinterpreted as signifying gang membership.

Sound familiar? It ought to if you are raising a teenager in these days of the enduring popularity of the so-called gangsta look. And if you are like most parents from the baby boom generation, your teens’ favorite clothing choice poses something of a dilemma for you. On the one hand, by belonging to a generation that virtually invented the fashion codes of generational defiance, you understand your children’s need to express themselves, and their generational identity, through their clothing. But on the other hand, you worry about the risks gang-related clothing can invite. You may even feel threatened by the gang attire of other people’s children.

Such a common dilemma bears some looking into, especially given the longevity of the gangsta fashion era, which shows no sign of ending soon. That longevity is in itself both puzzling and significant, because youth fashion characteristically has a very high rate of turnover. Just consider all of the youth fashion shifts of the ‘60s alone, which retired the Elvis Presley look and moved through surfer, Mod and hippy phases before landing in the ‘70s, which brought in a whole new suite of fashion changes. But those baggy pants, and other gang-related fashions like shaved or closely cropped hair, have hardly changed at all since they moved from ghetto and barrio to suburb in the late ‘80s. What could such a fashion endurance mean?

I don’t think that there’s a functional explanation. It’s true that baggy trousers may be more comfortable for an increasingly overweight youth population, but plenty of skinny and average-weight kids insist on wearing them. And while skaters or snowboarders (who have adopted oversized pants as a part of their uniform) might claim they need the space for flexibility in their sports, spandex is obviously a better choice. No, I think that the real explanation lies in a larger cultural trend that goes beyond the perennial need of American youth to express their sense of generational identity through the clothes they wear.

Let’s begin with the fact that no matter how you slice it, gang-related styles maintain a real, as well as symbolic, association with a thriving street gang subculture. No matter what your intentions, if you’re a teenage boy with a shaved head and baggy pants hanging out with a group of boys who look just like you, you’re going to look menacing. For just as I, with my long ponytail and beard, will look like a hippie to anyone who doesn’t know me, anyone who dresses like a gangster is going to look like one.

And I think that this is part of the point. A lot of suburban kids dress like gangsters because they admire gangsters. The menacing appearance, the capacity for sudden violence, simply looks cool to a lot of middle-class kids without actual gang affiliations. Indeed, sometimes the one real-life gangster on a suburban campus can be among the most popular kids in class.

We should hardly be surprised by this when the commercial interests that peddle entertainment to the young continue to glamorize what I call “the culture of menace” through gangsta rap (still the most popular form of hip-hop music) and gangster films. They know what sells, and the culture of menace has been increasing its market share year after year.

*

But isn’t the gangsta style just a harmless fashion, something that we old fogies can’t, and aren’t supposed to, appreciate? Well, in part, yes, but the popularity of menacing styles may also reflect our growing cultural fascination with menace itself. With our entire society increasingly captivated by violence, it is little surprise that menacing fashions should stay in fashion.

At the same time, the appearance that it is the young who are especially captivated by the culture of menace seems to be opening up a new generation gap that is even more cavernous than the celebrated gap of the ‘60s. There was a whole lot of hostility between the generations in that tumultuous decade, but I don’t think that adults were as frightened of the young then as they seem to be today. “Get a haircut,” our parents told us in the ‘60s. Today, many of us are afraid to even talk to a shaven-headed neighbor kid in baggy pants. Some parents are afraid of their own children.

One could say that an adult backlash against the culture of menace has begun. If you don’t think so, consider the overwhelming passage of Proposition 21 last year, which makes it possible to treat youth offenders as young as 14 as adults in criminal court. Most teenagers, of course, resent having to take the rap for the actions of a relatively few criminals, but it’s important to realize that if you don’t want to be taken for a criminal it helps not to dress like one.

Such a divide between the generations does no one any good. So I hope that a change is in the air, that a new fashion system is now brewing among the young that will continue to express the difference between the generations but without projecting the culture of menace. Anyone for a grunge revival?