Changing Times... for Japanese Fashion
I watching was the video podcast of (uncompromisingly-liberal) PBS program Bill Moyers’ Journal, and in a segment called “Changing Times” about the Obama victory in the context of the civil rights struggle, Moyers told the story of Johnnie Marie Ross — an African-American woman who attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and voted for Obama.
The visuals cut to a picture of an article about Ross from the San Francisco Chronicle, and in the main photograph, the current Ross is wearing a (possibly fake, possibly real) BAPE camouflage hoodie. Talk about progress for Japanese street fashion!
November 14, 2008 at 12:58 pm
ha, love it.
November 16, 2008 at 9:42 pm
you can go to almost any hood in america the past few years and see young kids in bootleg BAPE gear. it caught on big after lil wayne wore his camo pink bape hoodie on the cover of a couple mags a couple years back.
“haters getting mad cause i got me some bathing apes!” -soulja boy
November 17, 2008 at 9:46 am
Didn’t Nigo pay like $300k for Lil Wayne to wear BAPE stuff on tv/for a photoshoot?
November 17, 2008 at 10:05 am
Is there any proof of that? There are always rumors of Nigo paying off people to wear his stuff, but I can also see why people would want to wear it if they just got it for free.
November 21, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Wow- This is one of the greatest moments in African American History and all you can focus on is what she is wearing??? This Lady is MY MOTHER. And for the record- yes it is real… and no one paid her to wear it. But who cares? Maybe they should have also wrote that this lady is suffering from kidney failure and is undergoing some major life changes. Maybe then people wouldn’t focus so much on her BAPE sweater???
November 21, 2008 at 3:40 pm
We absolutely meant no disrepect to Ms. Ross. Like many, I spent the week of Obama’s election elated, and I never meant to take anything away from the place of Ms. Ross and Mr. Obama in the context of the African-American struggle.
This blog is about Japan, however, and I thought it was interesting to see a Japanese fashion show up in such an unlikely place. Certainly I did not mean to compare the gravitas of this amazing chapter in history to the importance of Bape.