Charlotte, N.C./Oct. 5, 2023 – Dr. Tyler Bunzey, assistant professor of Cultural Studies at Johnson C. Smith University, says his courses offer students the unique opportunity to learn from industry greats.
This semester, he’s invited four fashion designers, some of whom have designed for Gucci, P Diddy, King Combs and Kodak Black, to his classrooms via Zoom. They all donated their time for free to inspire students to engage in creativity.
“This is the second time I’ve offered the History of Hip-Hop Fashion course,” he said. “Our students really wanted it, so I did the best I could and managed my network to create a course that would be meaningful to them.”
Students have met with Shirt King Phade (the Mighty Shirt Kings) and Dapper Dan (Gucci).
Daniel R. Day, or Dapper Dan, has a particularly interesting story. Litigation by luxury brands ran his boutique out of business in the 1990s after he designed a jacket for Olympic sprinter Diane Dixon in the late 80s. In the design, he used the Louis Vuitton logo without the brand’s permission.
In 2017, social media buzzed with news that Gucci had remade the jacket that cost Day his boutique but replaced the Louis Vuitton logo with the Gucci logo. Dixon even posted the designs to her account beside the Day’s design, captioning it “give credit to @DapperDanHarlem. He did it first in 1989.”
Day used his resurgence to speak up about the many racist designs that had come from several fashion houses, even holding Gucci accountable in 2019 for a balaclava that emulated a racist blackface caricature.
Bunzey asked Day how he overcame the many barriers in his career and wondered what had turned the Harlem native into the man he had become today.
“I had to rethink everything about myself, why I thought the way I thought and was living the way I was living,” he said. “Before you build a brand, you have to build the man. I stopped looking for answers outside of myself and started examining what was wrong within myself.”
Students will also have opportunities to engage with industry professionals, including TJ Walker (Cross Colours) and Lade Aiyeku, in the coming weeks.
Last spring, Bunzey hosted a hip-hop speaker series in collaboration with associate sociology professor Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie from Davison College. Some of the guests included 9th Wonder and Rapsody, who Bunzey said was a particularly interesting guest as his class was studying her 2019 album, Eve, at the time.
The class was able to take a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2022, where they took a private tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. As a part of the class, they developed the Bring it Back to Us webpage, which discusses the vital African-American contributions to fashion as we know it today.
Bunzey said hip-hop courses like these are able to keep students engaged in the humanities, which have experienced defunding on a national scale. He said this is likely due to the professional dichotomy of practical and creative skills.
“Creativity is an often-lauded quality conceptually,” he said. “But when it comes to practicing it, because it isn’t a practical talent or skill you learn, it isn’t recognized as rigorous. But, teaching our students to think creatively allows them to think expansively. The entrepreneur is using practical skills to enter a system while a creative is using their skills to imagine something beyond the system.”
He explained that professions in the arts and humanities fields are typically mentorship-based, which can be hard to conceptualize for students looking for a profitable career.
He said his goal is to teach students that there are career pathways in the arts and humanities field.
“I want our students to see that they don’t have to act, talk or look a certain way to make a humongous difference in this world,” said Bunzey. “Many of the artists in this series didn’t have a linear career path, a crystal clean image or a college-educated background. The key is that there is always space for creativity if you’re creating from an authentic space.”
For more information on the Cultural Studies Program, contact Bunzey at tbunzey@jcsu.edu.
