It all started in the distant past back into the very early 1990s. MC Hammer wearing his baggy Jeanie pants changed the way teenagers wanted to wear their clothing. Bagginess was invented. Along came a brand name designer onto the street fashion scene who made jeans that looked like no other. His name was Karl Kani. Karl Kani invented a style and a genre that still exists to this day. Premium Brand Hip Hop Jeans. If you look back further, you just won’t see any jeans that were Designer Made for the street influenced Hip Hop Crowd. They didn’t exist. Sure you could find regular Designer jeans like Calvin Klein and Guess but they were not designed with Hip Hop Music in mind. Karl Kani brought something that everyone who manufactured jeans copied, His entire style of leather patch with rivets and plaque and leather straps on the back pockets and cargo pockets. Nothing else looked like that before. Karl Kani jeans were very sucessful in spite of $75 price tag considering you would be hard pressed to find jeans that cost over $40 back then. His success in premium Hip Hop Jeans spurned a whole industry of followers. By 1995, new brands such as Fubu, Akademiks came to life with all the bells and whistles of detail and a premium price tag as well. I was due to this success of premium hip hop jeans that one of the biggest recording Hip Hop Moguls of all time, none other than Shawn Carter aka Jay-Z immediately got into the Hip Hop designer label business as soon as he became successful. We all know that name which is still going strong to this day. Rocawear. The huge seemingly overnight success in rocawear jeans made every other rapper want to do the same exact thing. Come up with their own brand name. Outcast came out with their brand about the same time and had some success for a short time. Russell Simmons started Phat Farm as well which has been dying a slow death for the past couple of years. There has been many other labels from other rappers that just never caught on and just kind of disappear. It’s not easy to manufacture jeans and charge three to four times the amount if they weren’t a brand name. The style has to be innovative and special. That’s what a lot of these wannabee designers are not doing. They are just making the same old thing and trying to charge $85. That just won’t work. The jeans have to have a style that is so different that it makes the other brands seem like old hat. If you are lucky enough to come up with a totally unique style, you have about a year before everyone else copies you, so you better keep coming up with totally fresh ideas.
One HipHop Jean brand which is has been at the forefront of fresh ideas is LRG. LRG is the initials for Lifted Research Group. Started by two mismatched guys from California. Lrg seems to have crossed both streams of jean fashion from Skateboarders to Street style Hip hop fashion. LRG jeans have a look all their own with a sort of emphasis on enviromentalism. You will often see trees on the pocket as well as tree for it’s logo.
