Fashion Riot

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today in the show, the statements Americans have made with their fashions over the years. We’re going to spend a few minutes now with a fashion trend whose meaning underwent a remarkable number of transformations over a relatively short period of time. And that would be the zoot suit.

[MUSIC – Kay Kyser & His Orchestra, “A Zoot Suit (For My Sunday Gal)”] I want a zoot suit, with the reet pleat, with the drape shape and a stuff cuff–

ED: This was a look invented in the late 1930s by young African American men in Harlem, and it was a lot like a regular men’s suit, only more so. More in the sleeves, which reach down to the fingertips. More in the pants, which ballooned. More vibrant, red, blue, bright green, and mustard yellow fabrics.

KATHY PEISS: I think that it is a playing with the fashions that are already there for men, but just bringing it to a higher level.

ED: Kathy Peiss is a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, and she’s traced the changing meaning of the zoot suit. The first jump she’s found was from Harlem to Los Angeles, where the style was adopted by Mexican Americans. And there, in June of 1943 it took center stage in a violent episode involving American military men. An episode that came to be known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

KATHY PEISS: Servicemen pick out zoot suited Mexican-American youth as targets. And when they’re on leave, they go into the city, and they go into the movie houses, restaurants, dance halls, and all over the streets, looking for men wearing zoot suits, and beating them up and tearing the suit’s off their backs.

ED: So calling it a Zoot Suit Riot is kind of a misnomer in a way. It’s not that the zoot suitors were actually starting any kind of conflict, right?

KATHY PEISS: That’s correct. It should have been called the Servicemen’s Riot. And by calling at the Zoot Suit Riot, it was a way to reduce the racial identification of this conflict. So they’re going after these young men in these outlandish outfits, who are not responsible people.

ED: If you’re wondering why the outlandishness of an outfit would be associated with irresponsibility, consider the context. This was 1943 after all, smack in the middle of World War II.

KATHY PEISS: With the arrival of World War II, with the need to conserve fabric, these suits become targets of concern both on the part of the government and on the part of ordinary citizens who see them as unpatriotic.

ED: And unpatriotic because they’re consuming material that could otherwise be used for uniforms and other war material, right?

KATHY PEISS: Yes they’re seen as unpatriotic because they use so much material, but also they become associated with racial and ethnic minorities. And there’s so much racial tension in this era, that the suit also is unfairly seen as a sign of a draft-dodger or someone who’s shirking his patriotic duty.

ED: Peiss puts most of the blame for the zoot suits increasingly negative connotations at the feet of newspapers in LA. In the early 1940s competition among those papers was fierce, and they tried to outdo each other with breathless accounts of local crime.

KATHY PEISS: They really target Mexican-American youth as criminal, as juvenile delinquent. And the federal government asks them not to identify these young people as Mexican-American, because it is offending our allies, the Mexicans, and the good neighbor policy. And so they begin to use this term “zoot suitor” to describe Mexican-Americans. And there’s a series of violent incidents that brings the zoot suit into public light in a very glaring and negative way. And that contributes to this idea that it is the zoot suit that is the cause of the riot. But somehow this item of fashion can be a sinister force in and of itself.

ED: In subsequent years the zoot suit would become the preferred look for the bad guys in Disney cartoons. But at the same time, Peiss says the zoot suit was taking on an entirely different meaning overseas. American jazz musicians, and movies, had carried the look to countries like France, and Germany, and even the Soviet Union. Black South Africans even in the midst of apartheid started donning it. And in these places, the zoot suit came to stand in for ideals of freedom and useful independence.

KATHY PEISS: Elements of it are used by young people in part to convey a certain kind of Americanness. Which is interesting, because in the United States it’s seen as being perhaps not American. So in France, for example, and even in Nazi Germany, there were young people who wore some zooted styling. In the case of the swing youth in Germany, as a way to kind of push back against Nazi regimentation.

ED: The suits had a second act in America too. In the 1960s, zoot suits began appearing as the outfits not of criminals, but rather of heroes, in magazines, plays, and novels, coming out of the Chicano pride movement.

KATHY PEISS: There is a search for usable myths, usable heroic figures. And some of that goes back to ancient Aztec, mythological figures. But there’s also a recovery of the zoot suit as actually a sign of assertion, of Mexican-American pride, kind of redefining what it means for a new age.

ED: And yet, despite all this, despite the highly politicized meanings of the zoot suit, Kathy Peiss says we shouldn’t reduce its story only to politics. Over the years, she says, people have had all kinds of reasons for wearing the outfit.

KATHY PEISS: I guess what I would like people to think about is the way that fashion works in complicated ways and then its meanings are not easily reduced to politics. So there are moments when the zoot suit is intensely political, but there also are moments when it really is about pleasure, it’s about aesthetics, and it’s about an identity that’s not simple a political identity.

ED: That’s Kathy Peiss. She is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style.