Make room for hip-hop: mass-print mediation of ‘baggy’ basketball shorts, 1990–1994

Abstract

In the early 1990s, a fashion trend swept the American basketball sphere: long, looser-fitting, ‘baggy’ shorts replaced the tight uniform bottoms that had been normative throughout the game’s history. This article addresses cultural representation of the newly baggy shorts, with a focus on news media commentators’ discursive framing of the trend’s expression at the college and professional levels. When approached as a cultural text, these shorts are revealed to be a nexus at which discourses around race, class, gender and generation took place. Commentators largely avoided explicit references to race, instead organizing criticisms through a focus on the ‘style’ they deemed lacking in the disorder of bagginess. However, the introduction of this aesthetic by predominantly black players, combined with the roots of bagginess in hip-hop culture, indicate that such discourse carried regulatory ideologies on urban, working-class blackness and the implications of its mass cultural appropriation.

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