A fashion firestorm over pants that sag

Construction worker Nasir Macklin has always worn oversize pants belted well below his waist. Sometimes his boxers peek out, sometimes they don't. He never really thought about it that much.

So when the 23-year-old West Philadelphian heard that two South Jersey elected officials had proposed making the hip-hop-influenced style illegal, the fashion police were hitting too close to home, he said.

"That's bananas," said Macklin, standing in front of an open-air CD stand near the Market Street El's 52d Street station.

"It's not like I don't know how to dress," Macklin added. "If I had a job interview, I'd dress up. If I was going somewhere where I had to dress up, I'd pull my pants up. But it's comfortable for me. This is my style."

Councilwoman Annette Lartigue of Trenton and Councilman Lincoln Green of Pleasantville set off a local fashion firestorm recently when they introduced legislation aimed at tightening indecent-exposure laws in their respective towns. Their target: young people who wear pants so low, they say, backsides are exposed.

"Where do you draw the line?" asked Lartigue, who says she's fielded calls from ABC World News Tonight as well as The Dr. Phil Show. "That's my question. As a parent, I've drawn the line. Enough is enough. I refuse to be on the streets publicly looking at someone's behind."

Both Pleasantville and Trenton are following the lead of a few small towns in Louisiana that enacted similar indecent-exposure laws in the early summer. In June, the Board of Aldermen in Delcambre, La., passed a law that made wearing sagging pants punishable by a $500 fine. According to the town's police department, it hasn't been enforced yet.

Similar legislation will be discussed this week in Atlanta. As of now, the discussion has not come up among Philadelphia City Council members.

After all, said Jacqueline Barnett, the Philadelphia school system's secretary of education, how would one enforce the rules? "In public places, controlling what people wear can be a difficult argument to make," Barnett said. "It is so hard to enforce, it becomes a moot point."

Scholars and social observers say the proposed laws have very little to do with indecent exposure. James Peterson, an expert in hip-hop culture at Bucknell University, says young men usually wear the droopy pants over boxer shorts (sometimes as many as three pairs) to avoid any exposure - especially the "plumber's crack." In hip-hop circles, that's as far from masculine as you can get.

"This is completely reactionary and totally misdirected," Peterson said.

"It's indicative of the growing schism between the older generation in the black community and the younger generations in the black community, as well as the upper class and the poor. It's a sad state of affairs."

(Both Lartigue and Green are black, as are all those who introduced the legislation in Louisiana and Georgia.)

Peterson said these proposed style laws are a backlash to Don Imus' attack on the Rutgers women's basketball team. As a result, black leaders buried the N-word and even rap mogul Russell Simmons said certain words were no longer appropriate in hip-hop music.

The banning of the baggy pants, Peterson said, is another example of trying to stomp out a form of self-expression by black youth that can be taken out of context by the mainstream.

And as far as the latest in fashion goes, suburban kids - both black and white - have moved away from all things baggy to Kanye West's more preppy, fitted look.

So, said Marc Lamont Hill, professor of American studies and urban education at Temple University, the baggy-pants edicts have become an attack on less-affluent inner-city youths - the same group that has suffered most from poor education and gun violence.

"What they [the lawmakers] have done is criminalize developmentally appropriate behavior," Hill said.

"When you talk about baggy pants, you have to talk about the broader scope of youth resistance. What about super-tight clothing? What about Goth culture? A lot of people find that offensive, but they haven't written laws to stop it."

But maybe it's time, said Councilman Green of Pleasantville.

"I'm getting the seniors that come to see me in my district asking me what are we going to do about it," Green said.

"If you are trying to make a point, or if you have an issue, there are other ways to do it than wearing your pants down."

For better or worse, the baggy look has been a part of hip-hop culture for more than 20 years.

It started in the mid-1980s, when then-New School rap artists such as LL Cool J amped up slightly oversize sportswear in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the flashy disco-centric pioneers such as Melle Mel and the Furious Five. Over time, the baggier the clothes, the tougher artists seemed.

"Many people said the look was strictly the glamorization of prison culture," Peterson said. "But that's not the whole story. A lot of groups like Tribe [A Tribe Called Quest] and the Jungle Brothers were into the Bohemian look, and that was very baggy by nature. Did you ever see any hippies wearing tight clothes?"

As hip-hop became more prevalent, female performers such as TLC and MC Lyte started wearing the baggy look, and girls everywhere mimicked the clothing. Eventually, white rappers, including Mark Wahlberg and Vanilla Ice, made the oversize look popular with white teens as well.

With each year and every passing hip-hop trend, from conscious rap to the dirty South sound, britches became baggier and baggier. White T-shirts also got longer, and entire mouths became iced down with platinum.

Today, teens are so influenced by rappers like Lil Wayne that one can walk through any Philadelphia neighborhood and spot a young man (or woman) lumbering down the street wearing pants so sloppily big, the wearer has to hold them up with his hand, lest you have a peek-a-boo situation.

And that really irritates Lartigue.

"I'm sick of the whole kit-and-caboodle," she said.

But young men in Philadelphia say they will wear what they will wear. If a law were passed in Philadelphia, many said they'd be loath to follow it.

"I don't care about the law," said 22-year-old Shariff Walker, a cook in West Philly.

"I don't see how any city can tell us how to dress. If people don't like how I dress, that's not my problem. It's theirs."