Growing up on the south side of Chicago, the Reverend Dr Howard-John Wesley was given the message early on: what one wore as a black man mattered.
Wesley’s pastor father, who moved from Louisiana after World War II in search of more opportunities than those readily available to black people in the Deep South, “always had an impeccable sense of shirt and tie and suit”.
“In order to move in certain spaces where coloured people were not allowed to be, you want to be dressed the right way to be able to fit in,” says Wesley, 53, now a senior pastor in Alexandria, Virginia.
But Wesley also got an early warning: what he wore could be used against him. His father forbade baseball caps because some street gang members wore them in certain ways, and his father was concerned authorities would make stereotypical or racist assumptions about his son if he were seen wearing one.
Clothing as a message. Fashion and style as tools, signifiers of culture and identity, whether intentional or assumed. There’s probably no group for whom that has been more true than black men. It is not just what they wear, but also how it has been perceived by others seeing it on a black man, sometimes at serious cost.
