![]() “But if somebody did something wrong, my mother would say, ‘Get the Bible!’ You had to put your hand on the Bible and swear you didn’t do it. That sustained us, like having new clothes,” Dap recalls. ![]() Raised in the nearby housing projects at 127th Street and Lenox Avenue, Dapper Dan (born Daniel Day) and his six siblings were taught to be proud despite their poverty, and steadfast in the face of temptation. The very same designs that Gucci-alongside other luxury brands, a future Supreme Court justice, and anti-counterfeiting investigators-tried so desperately to eradicate three decades earlier.ĭapper Dan's atelier location is confidential, hence the discrete entrance. Metamorphosis has always been a key theme for Dap, but especially these days, a point made clear in the irony of his new arrangement: a collaboration with Gucci to produce sanctioned recreations of his classic designs. He stares into the mirror, tugs his lapels. He has on the kind of shoes most men wouldn’t dare eye in a shop window, much less have the confidence to actually purchase, and sunglasses with his own name spelled down the arms in Swarovski crystals. There’s an exquisitely patterned cravat tucked behind the bib of his pique front shirt a matching handkerchief billows from his breast pocket. He reemerges minutes later wearing a midnight-blue dinner jacket and ankle-cropped trousers-the fashion icon who has called himself “the first hustler-slash-designer,” in all his glory. ![]() He bends around a backdrop to study the setup and compliments the progress: “Oh! You just need a body now.” Taking his cue, Dap disappears into a heavily draped changing room. He’s tall, thin, and strikingly-for a man who one could reasonably imagine sleeping in a well-tailored waistcoat and cordovan monk straps-underdressed, in a semi-blank canvas of white shorts, T-shirt, and red-and-blue patterned Gucci loafers. Nearby, Dapper Dan’s son and manager takes a phone call along a wall of ornate fabrics, spooled five-high, while an assistant nearly knocks over a green-marble side table stacked with Gagosian catalogs and Jamel Shabazz’s hip-hop street style bible, Back in the Days.Īccustomed to the bustle, Dap breezes through, past a framed photograph of himself outside of the Apollo, taken by Ari Marcopoulos. A photography crew navigates the spaces between deep-red walls, velvet room dividers, and a walnut fireplace, setting a shot for their subject. It’s a Thursday afternoon at Dapper Dan’s atelier-a three-story operation that opened in January at an undisclosed brownstone in Harlem-and the normally by-appointment-only front room nears capacity. Dapper Dan says he's just getting started. He's a pioneering designer, a master couturier, a style icon.
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