Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
A zoot suit (occasionally spelled zuit suit[1]) is a men's suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. It is most notable for its use as a cultural symbol among the Hepcat and Pachuco subcultures.
With its super-sized shoulder pads, sprawling lapels and peg leg pants, the zoot suit grew out of the “drape” suits popular in Harlem dance halls in the mid-1930s.
The Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 were violent clashes in which U.S. servicemen, police officers and civilians brutalized Latinos and other minorities in Los Angeles.
The zoot suit, colloquially known in its era as “drapes,” was, by most accounts, made prominent by African Americans in Harlem and then quickly embraced by working-class youths across the country...
The servicemembers’ indiscriminate attacks on Mexican Americans made the Zoot Suit Riots part of a larger pattern of racial unrest in Detroit; Harlem; Beaumont, Texas; and Mobile, Alabama, that revealed internal social and political strains in the United States during the war.
In the book, Peiss, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, examines the fashion phenomenon that became so politically polarizing it played a part in sparking a vicious uprising in California, known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
The zoot suit, with its relaxed, flowing lines, was a departure from structured menswear of the 1930s and 40s and became popular in the U.S. with jazz musicians and their young fans, who...
In 1979, a play called "Zoot Suit"—based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder case and the Zoot Suit Riots—lasted for 41 performances on Broadway. What's more, the outlandish garb sported by inner-city pimps in countless exploitation movies is based on the Zoot Suit.
The zoot suit style fell out of favor after WWII. But its exaggerated silhouette exemplifies how exclusive barriers to fashion are broken down through the creative ingenuity of the unsung.
Zoot Suit Riots, a series of conflicts that occurred in June 1943 in Los Angeles between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths, the latter of whom wore outfits called zoot suits. The zoot suit consisted of a broad-shouldered drape jacket, balloon-leg trousers, and, sometimes, a flamboyant hat. Mexican and Mexican American youths who wore ...