“We’re Starting To Become More Comfortable With Who We Are”: Remixing Contemporary Hip-Hop Fashion In Tāmaki Makaurau

Abstract

Since the emergence of hip-hop fashion in the late 1970s in New York, it has become both a multi-billion dollar global industry and a conduit for marginalised populations worldwide to perform resistant identities. While scholars have explored hip-hop fashion in its (African American) origin communities as a version of Black style, how it is adapted outside of the United States requires further scholarly attention. This thesis explores how and why hip-hop fashion is used by artists in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) – including Māori and Pasifika rappers and dancers, and an African-Kiwi rapper – to perform their identities. A qualitative and visual analysis of fashion imagery across music videos, live performances, still images, social media, and journalism has revealed how these artists evoke themes related to identity such as gentrification and community representation, entrepreneurship and class marginality, racism, feminism, queerness, and African-Kiwi culture. The diversity across these themes and identities makes Tāmaki Makaurau’s hip-hop fashion diverse as well: no singular look typifies Tāmaki Makaurau presently. I argue that this is because the fashion observed in this research displays “global-local” tendencies. Tāmaki Makaurau hip-hop fashion manifests the multiculturalness and transnational qualities of the city’s twenty-first century demographics. It is specific to local cultures and experiences – especially to Moana cultural sensibilities which guided “old-school” Aotearoa hip-hop – yet is simultaneously situated in global economic and cultural flows of fashion, popular culture, and people (diasporas). Black and Brown (African- Kiwi, Māori, and Pasifika) performers construct distinct versions of localised authenticity in the genre, yet are connected through their shared dissension against global White-supremacist, colonial power structures. These artists leverage positions inside the global capitalist fashion and music industries to uplift and celebrate marginalised communities and identities, performing ambivalent class identities that both embrace and resist consumerism. Furthermore, these artists confront normative gender expectations in hip-hop, and western society at large,

by wearing fashion that ‘queers’ and exposes the fallacy of White-supremacist, colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative conventions and stereotypes. This research ultimately demonstrates how diverse communities define their individual and collective identities by conforming, diverging, challenging and “remixing” pre-existing hip-hop genre conventions.