White dude: Highly rounded baseball cap, white tee shirt, and khacki pants or shorts. Incomplete without a huge beer gut! The “goo’ol boy” look.
Black dude: Tremendous baggy pants, no laces, and FUBU or something like that on top. The “thuggin’” look.
Never the twain shall meet.
When I was hanging around Athens, Georgia, in the summer of '93, it was amazing how many of the white doods were sporting the “goo’ol boy” look. It was almost like a uniform. What a joke.
At any rate, I’m from Indiana, which, in the NW and in Indy, has quite a mixed populace. Any major department store must cater to both whites and blacks, and they do not put up signs saying which clothes (or what “gear”) is to be worn by whom. Not that I care. I usually go for the “too neutral to be preppy” look, a clear avoidance of style.
But my question is the thread title: How far apart are white and black styles these days? Is there overlap? How much? Obviously, there are hillbilly styles that no self-respecting black man would ever imitate, and the same is true of certain black styles (a white guy would feel foolish in them). But what about for those folks who do not go for the extremes.
I have spent most of the last four years in Japan and am totally clueless. Tell me what’s going on.
Look at it this way: “You spent four years in Japan? You must be really smart, cause all those Asian people do is study. Did you study a lot like all of the Asian people?”
Question: To what degree do black people and white people dress differently in the USA today?
People are free to point out Hispanic styles too, whatever. For example, one new(ish) Hispanic style (not clothing) is the “bald head + mustache” look.
Question: To what degree do black people and white people dress differently in the USA today?
I wasn’t aware that it was a black/white thing. I know plenty of white guys and black guys that dress alike, from one extreme to the other. If you’re trying to stereotype people by their attire, especially in the US, you’re going to have a problem. Maybe you’ll have a little better luck if you break it down into regions and then rural vs. urban. Then again depending on socioeconomic…which is all for shit because all you really need to do is watch TV and see what the pop stars are wearing and that’d probably give you a better idea.
Then again WTF do I know…we all wear cowboy hats and boots around these parts. Yep, black folks too.
I’m still trying to figure out the hillbilly angle. As far as I know, most everyone wears overalls.
None whatsoever! The post is a question: Do people of different races dress differently in the USA today? Are there some styles that only a white guy or a black guy would wear?
Etc. etc. I am a clueless, ignorant fool when it comes to style and fashion. You may take offense at my ignorance, of which I have plenty, but not my prejudice, whereof I have none to offer.
The point is that there is no distinction between the different “races” in the US by their attire. You will see any and everything you can imagine widely distributed throughout the country. There are regions where you’ll see more western wear. But it won’t be JUST white guys in cowboys hats. there are places where you’ll see more “hip-hop” WTF that is…but there’ll be plenty of white kids weraing the same. Hispanic, oriental etc. etc.
you wear what your friends are wearing for the most part. Now if you hang out with beer swilling, t-shirt wearing, cutoffblue jeans and ball caps…guess what?
That don’t tell me shit about what color your skin is. Cause buddy I git friends all over and all colors that fit that description…male AND female.
I’m not ragging on ya…and admitting your ignorance about fashion is cool, because I don’t claim to be an expert by any standard. But the US is too diverse to sterotype that way. Sure…I suppose you could go to extremes and then figure the stats and percents etc. and come up with some numbers. But why bother?
Like I said, if you want to get a clue about US fashion trends watch the pop stars. At least with younger generations. Old folks like me just wear the same thing year after year…friggin clothes are too expensive and besides thay’ll come back in style. I’ve still got some old disco era shit in my folks closet that my son was asking about awhile back.
How old are you asking about…teens, twenties, thirties older? It makes a difference. My son for instance…highschool. Baggies, t-shirt w/sports or some pop logo…huge ass sneakers w/ loose ties…cell phone…walkman… sound familiar?
To be fair to the OP t-keela, he was talking about what he noticed in the early 90’s. And in these days Aeschines, many people do dress the same. I see white guys all the time with saggy pants and baggy shirts, with the backward baseball caps. In the past, you can’t deny that different cultures dressed differently. Hell they still do. But these days it is more “equal”, or excepted to dress like another culture would, or to mix it up some.
When will people learn - the U.S. is a HUGE nation. The pissant little community you grew up in does not equal the entire country. Because there’s no national standard of dress, there’s no national segregation of dress.
That would seem to provide more opportunity for disparate “dress codes,” not less. By region, etc.
I see lots of wierd styles in Japan that you don’t see in the US. Logic: “There’s no planetary standard of dress, so there’s no planetary segregation of dress.”
There are many different styles of dress. These styles are not racially specific. For example, you have an Urban style that some people may call dressing black… but many people of all colors dress this way, you also have skateboarder style and that’s even before considering all the people who don’t dress in whatever fashion the latest MTV music video (they do show a video now and then, don’t they?) shows…
In my experience, in small town America, people of different races tend to dress more alike than they do in urban areas. In the town that I grew up with differences were mainly limited to hairstyles and color of the clothing. Because it was my favorite color, I noticed that it seemed like black kids were more likely to wear purple. The girls often wore small braids, not cornrows, but little braids about their head.
Here in Chicagoland, one of the more segregated cities, I have worked in Hyde Park and Waukegan. In Hyde Park, many black women wore more elaborate hair styles than most white women, sported fancier nail styles than nearly any of the white women seemed to. Very elaborate braided styles were popular with black women. The most striking was one woman who had her hair fashioned in a style reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara when she wore that one hat forward on top of swept up curls. There were no major discernable differences in white and black mens dress.
In Waukegan the only difference seems to be in hair styles. There are several black men here that have neatly groomed dreds of various lenghths that they wear tied back or up. There are no white men here that wear their hair in dreds, braids, or even in styles as long as long as the dreds.
Well, it sounded like you were asking about a national racial split of dress, that’s the only way your question would have made sense. Then you take this as an article of faith -
“Obviously”? I know you said you’re clueless, but here’s a reminder about your own country. We can do whatever we want, and that means there’s no such thing as racially incompatible clothing. I’m black and I spent a summer wearing geta. Though I’m not Japanese, my body didn’t reject them and I still respect myself.
And your parallel quote should read “There’s no planetary standard of dress, so there’s no planatary racial segregation of dress”, since that’s what we both were talking about. And that’s wrong - people around the world dress their region, not their race. For the most part, that’s the same in the U.S.
