The magnificent athleticism of Michael Jordan had transformed basketball he played the game with such grace that everyone wanted his shoes - Air Jordans - ushering in a wave of expensive sportswear and the sneakerheads who coveted them. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Imagesīut as the decade ended, prep was on the decline. Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan shoes ushered in the movement of elite sneaker culture. The trend even sparked articles like the Associated Press’s 1981 piece “School Dress Grows More Conservative.” Mostly, it reflected the growing trend of youth who’d taken such a liking to preppy styles that they self-policed their attire. That the district stopped hassling kids about their appearance in the ’80s didn’t mean it had adopted a liberal approach to student dress. And in 1969, Des Moines Independent famously lost a Supreme Court case for violating students’ First Amendment rights by suspending five teens for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. This marked a sea change for the district, which routinely sent students home in the 1950s for the slightest infractions, like not wearing belts. “We think there are more important things to do with our time and efforts than enforce a dress code,” a district spokesperson told the Associated Press at the time. In 1981, Iowa’s conservative Des Moines Independent School District stopped policing how students dressed because they all looked like Alex P. The preppy look was so dominant that school principals tasked with enforcing dress codes in the ’60s and ’70s, a thankless job considering the dominant trends of long hair for guys and micro-mini skirts for girls, started to relax.
It was that loads of Americans dressed this way, from little kids like me then to high school students and adults. It wasn’t that I was preppier than the norm, or that my mother was, since she dressed me. Rogers’s closet, and a stretchy canvas belt with metal hoops in the center instead of a buckle. I had penny loafers with actual pennies in them, an Izod cardigan that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Mr. During the Reagan years, I was a little black girl who dressed not altogether differently from what the rich popular dudes wore in John Hughes films. Preppy fashion was so pervasive in the 1980s that it transcended not only race but age too. Michael Jordan helped sportswear overtake the preppy look in popularity Just as youth of color have been disproportionately criminalized in schools, so has the style of clothing many of them enjoy. The historic outcry about trendy sportswear and the continued bans on gang apparel are a statement on how society views African Americans and, by extension, the clothing linked to them. Today, school dress codes across the country still include passages about gang attire, though the policies rarely define what such clothing is.
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They even influenced school officials to crack down on student dress.įootwear like Air Jordans was described as the attire of gang members and drug dealers, leading to bans in some schools. Although these incidents were far from the norm, they were used to paint African-American youth as immoral and materialistic. But in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the press increasingly linked sneakers and streetwear to youth violence.īlack teens in particular were the focus of news reports about robberies and murders related to expensive sportswear. Suburban dads like Andre Johnson on ABC’s Black-ish have tennis shoe collections, as did sneaker lover Turtle, the least-threatening member of the crew on HBO’s Entourage.
Today, sneaker culture seems almost tame.
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