Life magazine soon published an exposé titled “Cyclist’s Holiday: He and Friends Terrorize Town.” The article featured an image of a young biker, later identified as Eddie Davenport, slouched astride his Harley-Davidson, shirt open and surrounded by smashed beer bottles. Members of motorcycle clubs such as the 13 Rebels and the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington descended upon the rural town, engaging in brawls, shattering store windows, participating in illegal drag races and overrunning the small local police force. That summer, a procession of 4,000 bikers thundered into Hollister, a small California farming community hosting its annual Fourth of July carnival. ![]() ![]() Photographer: Barney Peterson/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris THE BLACK LEATHER MOTORCYCLE JACKETĮddie Davenport, inadvertently setting a generational trend. Decades after the 1940s racial attacks, many Americans have forgotten the racial and class elements associated with that look, and only remember it as something worn by stylish jazz greats such as Cab Calloway. By wartime, this sartorial spectacle, by then known as the zoot suit, migrated to the sock-hopping teens in Chicago and eventually landed on California’s coastline, where it became the preferred attire of Mexican Americans known as pachucos. The shoulder lines became more generous: padded, high-waisted, balloon-shaped trousers with knife-edge pleats billowed from the thighs: suit jackets cascaded down to the wearer’s knees and chests looked like wind-filled sails. Photographer: Gordon Coster/the Life Picture Collection/Shutterstockĭuring the Jazz Age, elements of the drape cut found their way into the nightclubs of Harlem, where its signature features became exaggerated. Pair of zoot-suit-wearing Black men walking down the street after wartime race riots. The drape cut also caught the attention of Hollywood luminaries like Fred Astaire, who was known to twirl and glide across Anderson & Sheppard’s fitting rooms to ensure his jacket’s collar never lifted off his neck when he was dancing. Scholte would soon become one of the most sought-after tailors in British high society, making clothes for the Duke of Windsor and training Peter Gustav Anderson, co-founder of Anderson & Sheppard. He devised a cutting method to incorporate this effect into his suits, inventing what’s now known as the “drape cut,” which features slightly extended shoulders, a fuller chest with excess material near the armholes and a nipped waist to give the impression of a stronger, V-shaped figure. In the early 20th century, a Dutch-English tailor named Frederick Scholte in London noticed that if you belt up a guardsman’s coat, the chest looks fuller and rounder, making the wearer appear more athletic. ![]() Zoot suits originated far from California’s shores, though. The Duke of Windsor, in a drape cut, in 1936.
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