You say suit, I call it zoot
BY LUKE TANNER
We all remember Jim Carrey wearing that fluorescent yellow suit in The Mask, Michael Jordan walking down the tunnel to the changing room in a big padded blazer or Tom and Jerry wearing a suit with large trousers and big shouldered jackets.
The story of how the Zoot style became a thing is one of the most interesting I’ve ever heard, it has a political resistance, ghetto uprising, riots and jazz clubs music vibes.
Way before punk was a thing.
A zoot suit is a men's suit with high-waisted trousers with tight cuffs, baggy legs and a long blazer with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. Everything is extreme and fashionable at the same time.
Here’s how it started: during the 1930s, dancing was a social way to shake away the blues brought on by the Great Depression and in Harlem, Manhattan they knew how to swing.
In those dance halls, male dancers started wearing baggy trousers and flashy padded jackets to emphasise their movements.
The style was popularised by music icons like Duke Ellington, Cab Callaway and Tin Tan, making it a trend among African Americans and Mexican Americans across the country.
Part of the white population, backed by the media with its racial undertones, began to associate this style with gang members and delinquents, seeing it as a source of crime in their cities.
It didn’t help that during WWII, the U.S. War Production Board regulated the production of civilian clothing containing silk, wool and other essential fabrics. Nevertheless, tailors in New York and Los Angeles kept crafting and peddling these suits on the black market and servicemen saw this as a waste of useful fabric.
The Mexican Americans wearing them, known as Pachuco, were racially profiled as unpatriotic.
Los Angeles was on the verge of violence when, in August 1942, after a brawl in a home outside town involving some Pachuco, the dead body of a man was found nearby. Police and media wasted no time in targeting the so called “zoot suiters”, arresting hundreds of unrelated individuals while 22 of them were found guilty for the murder. This verdict enhanced the tensions between Mexican Americans and white conservatives forces and the situation was set to implode.
A few months after, a group of servicemen walked the street of East LA, attacking those wearing zoot suits, stripping them naked and burning their clothes. The riot continued in the following days, spreading violence across the city involving Pachuco and young African American men, who got systematically arrested instead of the attackers. Things got so severe that Military Police was brought into the city, to control what will go down in history as The Zoot Riot.
In the aftermath, the Independent Citizens Commission stated that the main cause of the riot was racism, blaming the media for encouraging the violence and governing bodies for allowing the riots to continue.