Book description
ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly
American civilian suit.
-Cab Calloway, The Hepster's
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
1943-events 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 places-French zazous, South African tsotsi,
Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagi-made 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 outré 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.
"Zoot Suit is a sophisticated, independent minded, and
valuable book; there should be more work like it in the field. Peiss's
principled attention to evidence, her nuanced argument, and her
willingness to question conventional assumptions about the meaning of
popular forms all go a long way toward re-grounding American Studies
in the lived world."-Carlo Rotella, author of Good With Their
Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt
Kathy Peiss is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American
History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Hope in
a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, also available from the
University of Pennsylvania Press, and Cheap Amusements: Working Women
and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York.
