Book Notes: Dapper Dan: Made In Harlem: A Memoir, by Daniel R. Day

The secret to what I do is to capture what you think you look good in. But I also had a slogan: “Everything in your mind don’t look good on your behind.” I would build on how a customer like Serge felt about himself and how he wanted to look, and we’d work from there.

Nothing makes you question the purpose and meaning of life like hunger. Hunger is physical, it’s real. It’s so universal that all of us have experienced a taste of it, but if a person has never experienced it through the daily uncertainty of poverty, it’s hard to understand the way it shapes the rest of your life, especially when you realize that not everyone grew up feeling that way about food.

A lot of people who made the Great Migration weren’t able to survive in the Northern cities. Many were surprised to find the same racism they’d experienced down south, only different. Instead of cross burnings and lynchings, they found employers who wouldn’t hire, landlords who wouldn’t rent, banks who wouldn’t loan. Many returned to the South in defeat.

I remember coming out on the stoop with my mother and my siblings on our own way to church and seeing how beautiful that looked: the good people of Harlem walking around in their finest clothes, while the bad people of Harlem would be creeping back home from a long night at the bars and after-hours spots. Seventh Avenue on Sunday morning, nicknamed the Stroll, was the greatest runway in the world.

I’ve come to believe that religion is like a wall. If you’re leaning on the wall and it falls, then you fall, too. It’s better to be your own wall, to build your own spiritual and religious understanding. That’s been my approach to religion at least.

Words were power, and reading—reading closely and carefully—had kept us from losing our power. That was the moment I really saw the importance of analyzing and questioning everything. Reading could save you a lot of pain in the long term. And that’s remained true throughout my seven decades on this planet, from my street days to my fashion days: there’s no problem I can’t read my way out of.

being dark-skinned in Harlem at that time wasn’t easy. Colorism was as widespread as racism, with places like the Cotton Club refusing to hire any woman darker than a paper bag.

I loved writing, and I knew it brought pride to my mother that I was good at it, but it didn’t take William Shakespeare to see that the real winners were not literary types like my mother and our teachers, or working stiffs like my father. It was the hustlers who were winning. I began to wonder, Did Langston Hughes ever walk around with a briefcase full of cash like Uncle RC?

Now that my eyes were opened, everywhere I looked in my life there were pool sharks, cardsharps, pimps, drug dealers, and moonshiners. Hustling was a normal, often lucrative, line of work. Men like my father, who held a good city job until his retirement, were the rare exceptions. But whether you worked aboveground like Daddy or underground like my uncle RC, you had to have a special determination to survive in Harlem. The neighborhood weeded out the strong from the weak during the Great Migration, and it did the same for the next generation. Harlem became home to the crème de la crème of hustlers.

Gambling historians say that black people in Harlem invented the modern numbers game in the 1920s, lowering the entry fee for their poor clients and coming up with innovative ways to cut down on paper use. Early on, though, the Italian Mafia took control of the numbers racket, and it wasn’t until legendary Harlem boss Bumpy Johnson won it back that we started booking our own numbers.

The reason why legal lotteries make so much money for governments is the same reason the numbers racket was so lucrative: if your chance of picking a three-digit number is 1 in 1,000, and the maximum payout is 600 to 1, the house is never losing money. The only thing influencing profits is the popularity of the game.

During the Harlem Renaissance, dancing was so popular that the authorities took notice and decided to pass the infamous 1926 Cabaret Law, which forbid dancing without a license in New York City.

Like the five elements of hip-hop, my generation had an unspoken pantheon of elements that dictated our respect for hustlers:

Were you getting money?

Were you good at dancing?

Were you a ladies’ man?

Could you talk slick?

Were you fly?

Flyness wasn’t about how handsome you were, although that helped, or about how expensive your clothes were, although that helped, or what brand they were. Brands weren’t important. It was about something intangible. It was about style and how you carried yourself in the street.

I felt like I did whenever my mother hit her number and I laced up new shoes. Walking around school and the neighborhood with that hairdo made people look at me different. For the first time, I understood how deep it was to be fly. It wasn’t the outside that was important. It was that thing that happened inside you that gave you strength. I felt powerful.

I recognize now that that’s what I was: a hustling nerd. I studied other people’s hustles obsessively, always trying to find new angles and loopholes to make a buck. I wanted to create hustles no one had seen before. I paid special attention to guys like my cardsharp uncle, Fish Man Eddie, who never seemed to lose at poker but who no one ever caught cheating. How’d he do that? There was an elegance and a magic to it that I wanted to find a way towards.

Guys at the dice game would see the nice shoes and clothes, and their egos would start getting the best of them, throwing them off balance. The strategy was to distract them with our flyness. If you flyer than the next guy, he wants to win you, not the game. I needed to get them to want to win me.

CHAPTER 7   Too Easy

From the outside, the hustler lifestyle might look glamorous and exciting. But it’s all a lie. My early days in the streets, when I was learning the hustle and looking up to those older street guys, admiring the way they looked and acted and even held a cigarette, that was the most fun part of my entire hustling career. My hustling life after that was all pain, paranoia, and trauma

I’d say to whoever was near me, “Yo, man, this is it for me. I’m done with this.” But for the life of me, I couldn’t kick it. Finally, I got arrested again. It wasn’t a drug charge this time, but breaking and entering, which came with a heavier punishment than my first offense. I was facing up to a year in jail, possibly more. I didn’t have the money for bail, so I had to wait for trial. I spent the next three months in the Tombs, which is the nickname for the Manhattan Detention Complex in Chinatown. Back then, the Tombs lived up to its name and then some. The conditions were a nightmare.

CHAPTER 8   Tree of Life

I turned to my cellmate. “Who’s that?” “That’s 3X,” he said. Then he clarified: “One of the cats that killed Malcolm.” His name was Norman 3X Butler, and he was one of three men convicted for the assassination of Malcolm X.

Although he was not much older than me, Norman 3X commanded respect. Guards, inmates, lawyers, even the warden himself would come pay him visits.

He had a glow to him, a quiet commanding way of moving through the Tombs. It was like he wasn’t concerned with earthly affairs, but focused on something higher.

What did all my heroes have in common? Daddy, Gentleman Joe, Malcolm? None of them drank or got high. The message sunk deep into me. I started doing calisthenics in my cell. I said to myself, You know what, man? This is it. When I get out of this place, I’m living clean. I’m eating healthy. I’m not drinking ever again and I’m not going nowhere near dope. I’m gonna just endure. I’m gonna just be patient. I’m gonna just not have. That’s how a place called the Tombs started bringing me back to life.

“Poverty, Want and Sickness are the work of man. They are the products of his habits which correspond with his desires. He increases his burdens as he multiplies his wants. The less man needs the more complete he becomes.”

On my next visit to Tree of Life, I picked up Malcolm X Speaks, a book of Malcolm X’s speeches. One line in particular hit me. “If you want to understand the flower,” said Malcolm, “study the seed.” In other words, if you wanted to get to the bottom of something—a question, a problem—you had to go below the surface. You had to look at the roots and work your way back to what was in front of you. Studying the seed meant looking into myself, and it also meant reading history.

Metaphysics is the last stage in the evolution of any cultural form, and those who understand that are the ones who push culture forward.

I thought there were some flaws in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim ways of thinking, and I had problems with the Nation of Islam’s mythologies about white people and their emphasis on them as biological devils. That never rang true for me.

CHAPTER 9   Home

My relationship to hustling had changed. The books I was reading about religion, science, and spirituality were showing me that it took self-control to succeed. The power you brought over yourself from inside was what made the difference. That applied to any aspect of life, whether you were a civil rights leader, a fashion designer, or a hustler.

That trip, seeing all those skilled artists and tailors in all those different countries making beautiful things with their hands, had a permanent impact on me. Looking back, I realize that was what really changed me and my whole concept of fashion. It went deeper than I’d ever realized. Though I didn’t know it yet, that was the seed I went to Africa to find.

CHAPTER 10   Mind Games

Ever since I’d returned from Africa, I’d been an on-again, off-again visitor at the Nation of Islam’s No. 7 Mosque, and I’d also started attending regular meetings with the Black Panthers.

At one meeting, they closed the door, made sure no one was out in the hallway listening, then they passed around a sheet of paper with a list of names on it. It was a hit list. They was gonna kill all the drug dealers in Harlem, starting with every name on that list.

I couldn’t condone that kind of violence. I passed the sheet back, left, and never went to another Panther meeting again.

Ahmed was blowing my mind. With his help, I altered the cut on pants, changed the color on a blazer, and added lapels and flares to resonate with the trends back on the streets. I couldn’t remember being as excited about anything as I was when I placed my order with Ahmed. No one in Harlem had ever seen the designs and materials I was about to have. I knew it was going to wow people. It was gonna be African, but also European, but also street. Those clothes I collaborated on with Ahmed were my very first Dapper Dan original fashion designs. I started thinking about Orie’s old custom clothing shop in Harlem and how his business had gone under years ago. Ever since then, there’d been a void in Harlem. I began to think, Someone could fill that void. Not just making suits, like Orie had, but making anything. Pants, jackets, shirts, sweaters.

CHAPTER 12   Hubba Hubba

The reaction I got in Harlem to my new clothes was incredible. I came back from the motherland fly as what. They’d never seen the kinds of designs Ahmed and I had come up with.

was thinking more and more seriously about the clothes game, though I didn’t know where to begin. On top of all my life expenses, the money it would take to open a storefront and grow a business was still out of reach for a dice hustler.

Between 1965 and 1975, New York’s homicide rate skyrocketed, and in the years ahead it would only get more and more murderous. That was a grim, lonely time for the city. It was also a grim, lonely time for me. Unlike most everyone around me, I didn’t drink or get high, I was a vegetarian, I read books from the Theosophical Society. I had all this stuff going on in my head—spirituality, philosophy, all my memories of Africa, alongside street knowledge. Russell was the only one I could connect with, and him and I were both secretly miserable all throughout our gambling years. It was difficult to admit that maybe we weren’t just doing it for the money. Maybe a part of us, that was more important to us than we wanted to admit, was doing it for others. We wanted to be perceived in a certain way. We wanted to be seen as a certain type of guy. Though we said we understood the line between our true spiritual selves and the hustler personas we presented to the world, sometimes the line blurred, and we weren’t too sure where our souls ended and the streets began.

Shawn herself had stayed out of it. I had a great deal of respect for her. Which is why what she said next hit me with such power. “That’s what happens to people,” she said, “who make money off other people’s sorrows.”

She was right. As much as I tried to rationalize what I was doing, stealing from these dealers, I was still making money off of sorrow.

CHAPTER 14   Remakes

You had historic prosperity on one side of Manhattan and unprecedented suffering on the other—1980 was the most lucrative year in Wall Street history and the worst year of crime in New York City history, with over 2,200 murders.

Weak friends are worse than strong enemies. An enemy can’t tell me nothin, but a friend like Russell could tell me something and I’d trust him. Now I’ve got to watch out for him. He could come to me with a story that was sheer paranoia and, because he was my trusted friend, it could catch me out and put my life in danger.

PART III   THE SHOP THAT NEVER CLOSED

CHAPTER 15   A New Hustle

As my year off was coming to an end, I said to myself, Okay, now it’s time for me to figure things out.

What about clothes? Fashion for me wasn’t about expression. Fashion was about power. I would navigate the streets with a certain look until I could own the look. Being fly was a vehicle to getting around my situation in life. But guys liked the way I dressed, and I did know a lot about fashion. From my connection with the boosters, I’d sampled the market and built up a small customer base by selling pieces out of my trunk to the drug dealers I knew, getting a feel for what people on the streets wanted.

The strongest game that a player ever plays is the game he plays on himself.

When I opened my shop, my dream was to become a big-time furrier and cater to the underworld, where I knew the real money was in Harlem.

Even if these guys were my friends, I wouldn’t take no drug money as a business investment. But the retail side was another story. I relied on them as customers.

After I got the big-time hustlers, that was it. Every other street guy with money felt comfortable buying furs from Dapper Dan’s, turning this way and that in the big mirror that took up a wall in front.

At the time, there was no way I could make less than $1,000 on every coat I sold. That’s how sweet it was. If I invested $700 at the factory for crystal fox or mink—$400 for the skin plus $300 for the labor—I could have a men’s fur coat that retailed at $3,000. The prices were so inflated. Not unlike the dope game in the early days, the fur game was tightly controlled by a small group of businessmen that could do whatever they wanted with the price.

The key to staying relevant was to always come out with something different and new. I had to keep asking myself, Why should anyone come to my boutique? Why spend their money on my clothes?

“Dap,” they’d say, “why you hiding the fox?” “Yeah, man, why you putting it on the inside like the white boys?” They had a point, plus it was their money. I had Andrew and Marc start putting fox on the inside and the outside, so you could reverse it if you wanted to. It was my first attempt at customization and a learning experience in how to make clothes with the particular tastes of my customers in mind.

Oh yeah? They think they gone stop me. They think I can’t make these jackets. I’m gone find a way. But I couldn’t get the same high-end merchandise as A. J. Lester or my other competitors. Nor was I a fashion designer who could turn raw materials into finished clothing products. I hadn’t gone to fashion school. I didn’t even know how to sew. These were enormous obstacles. They felt damn near impossible to overcome. I didn’t know how or even where to begin.

CHAPTER 16   Boy Wonder

The vendor took my card, and within a week, a tailor showed up at my shop.

His name was Sekou, but soon everyone who came to the shop would know him as Big Sek. He’d become one of my best tailors, and when we needed more people, Big Sek helped staff my factory space with other skilled Senegalese tailors. That’s what started everything.

Soon after I hired Big Sek, we began making custom leather jackets. I started to understand and enjoy the process of designing and came to love the collaboration with the clients and my tailors.

Each generation in Harlem has what I call a Boy Wonder. The Boy Wonder is a street guy who captures the attention of the entire neighborhood with his style. He’s a hood celebrity—not an athlete or entertainer, because those guys didn’t really belong to us—but a successful hustler from around the way who’s so fly he triggers style in Harlem. A Boy Wonder cops chicks, and his chicks are fly, too.

CHAPTER 17   Closure

Silk-screening is a printing technique that traces back to China around the turn of the first millennium: it took about eight hundred years for silk-screening to reach Europe via the trade routes. The artist Andy Warhol popularized silk-screening in America in the 1960s, but most people didn’t really wear silk-screened T-shirts with designs and images until the late twentieth century.

gathered that the silk-screening process was something I had to learn if I wanted to make my own monogrammed fabrics.

when I started printing Louis Vuitton patterns on leather, one of the first things I did was look up the symbol. I went down to the main branch of the New York Public Library in midtown, where there was this huge room dedicated to the history of European family crests, and tried to find all the fashion-house crests: Gucci, Burberry, Fendi, you name it. I wanted to see how these symbols had evolved. When I found out that the Bally family didn’t have a crest, I created one for my line of Bally jackets. I wanted my whole line to look rich with history—not just European and Judeo-Christian history, but also African, Muslim, Eastern, and others.

One of the things I learned from all my spiritual readings and delving into other religions is that there are many pathways to God, but that, across religions, there are visual and narrative symbols which often seem to be in conversation with each other: snakes, eyes, wheels, stars. Symbols are doorways to myth and information.

Those hardworking, resourceful people like Robert Day, who had made the Great Migration from the South and had come to places like Harlem, intent on succeeding, inspired me to be bold, to take risks, to see openings that I might have taken for granted.

CHAPTER 18   Crack

I drew on my gambling experience to practice organized deception: everything I did to generate excitement was intentional.

Soon, I realized that I needed to start playing with egos more. Money was not an issue with my customers. It was all about respect and the way they felt. So, I hired attractive young women to work the floor, figuring that the presence of the girls would force egos out. Sure enough, that got rid of the haggling. Now the hustlers wanted to flaunt how wealthy they were. They’d pull out a big roll of hundreds and peel off a stack of bills like it was nothing.

CHAPTER 20   Beef

A snorkel is a three-quarter-length parka with a deep hood. You can zip it all the way up in cold weather, leaving a little opening for your face.

One month, I went to pay the landlord our rent for the factory space, and he joked, “You don’t have to pay me rent this month. Just give me what your workers have been stealing from you.” Man, I was under so much stress. I felt alone at the center of everything I’d created, without support or people I could trust.

It was one headache after another. When my phone rang before dawn one morning and I picked up to hear my nephew’s voice, I said, “What is it this time?” “Sorry to wake you up, Uncle Danny,” he said. “Mike Tyson just beat the shit outta Mitch Green right outside the shop.”

CHAPTER 21   The Vise

Intellectual property is still a gray area when it comes to fashion appropriation. Designers are constantly borrowing and sampling and getting inspiration from different cultures and from each other. It’s even more blurry in the art world. Andy Warhol’s career was one knockoff after the next.

Everyone I made clothes for knew I was making something original. My customers knew what they were paying for, and it wasn’t Louis, Gucci, or MCM. The Louis print ensemble and matching kufi that the Real Roxanne wore on the cover of her album couldn’t have been made by anyone else for anyone else. I moved the heritage brand aesthetic away from that Madison Avenue look and gave it that distinct uptown flavor. I was taking those logos to places the brands never would and making it look good on

Louis Vuitton was the first company to raid my shop. One day, a bunch of armed investigators just walked right in and started taking clothes off the racks like they belonged to them.

When the founder, Louis Vuitton, started making canvas trunks in Paris back in the 1850s, other European trunk makers copied him relentlessly. His designs were copied so much he had to start putting his name and trademark on the luggage until finally his son took out a patent. The family soon became the biggest name in European luggage, continuing to profit during World War II through collaboration with the Nazis.

One afternoon, maybe a half hour after MCM had gotten through raiding me, confiscating eight or nine large bags full of clothes, I got in the car to run an errand and spotted the agents who’d just been in my shop hanging out at a gas station. What I saw made my blood boil. They were taking the clothes they’d seized and splitting them up between themselves.

CHAPTER 22   Game Over

For nine years, I’d given every waking hour to the shop without so much as a vacation or a holiday. I’d been fighting since the beginning, since A. J. Lester had me blacklisted for undercutting their prices. And what did I have to show for it? A bullet lodged in my neck. An empty storefront. There is always some kinda war goin on outside, but the real war is inside. And I was fighting a war with myself about what I had achieved with the boutique. I knew I had made an impact, but was I any closer to whatever it was I was truly searching for? Like it says in the Kenny Rogers song I used to play for my hustling buddies before we went on a job, You gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em. It was time for me to fold em and walk away from the boutique and all that came with it.

CHAPTER 23   Flatfoot Hustling

June had a steady job in the billing department of a hospital, so while I laid up in bed doing nothing, we were living off her salary, which wasn’t enough for all the expenses. The bills were piling up. We were behind on our electric. We were behind on our mortgage. She and I would sit around the table putting pennies into rolls so we could scrounge up enough money for groceries. That’s how broke we were.

CHAPTER 24   Highways, Not Runways

People were always into Ralph Lauren and Polo, because of that aspirational lifestyle he created, but in the late eighties and early nineties, Polo actively reached out to its black customers with Polo Sport, featuring African American model Tyson Beckford prominently in their ad campaigns.

CHAPTER 25   Harlem River Blues

Sometimes a thing happens, and you think that it happened to knock you down, but it turns out the experience really knocked you up. That’s what those years after I closed the shop were. On those long road trips across the country, I got to learn so much about our people. I was taking in so much of black style and its amazing regional varieties. As an observer, it was a big education for me to see that diversity, the differences between Baltimore and DC, Detroit and Chicago. To see the many ways black people dressed, the different music we liked, the different brands and colors and looks that we gravitated towards.

While my parents and their generation had turned Harlem into the black mecca we remember it as, my generation was traumatized by the drug war and economic neglect. Of all my siblings, I was the only one who remained in Harlem. Our generation fled these state-sponsored traumas, turning our neighborhood into a ghost town that developers were eager to swoop down on and start profiting from. Now white people were moving into Harlem in record numbers. By the late nineties, black people were no longer the majority in Harlem.

I was more upset with how the early hip-hop fashion brands interpreted what I did than I was with the Europeans who interpreted my designs. The Europeans allowed my work to be appreciated on a higher level, whereas the black brands who interpreted my fashion took it to a lower level. All those early streetwear brands that had sprung up in the years after my shop closed would soon become relics. Phat Farm, Cross Colours, FUBU, Karl Kani, Mecca, all these guys who jumped into the hip-hop fashion game after me didn’t do their homework. I always wished they woulda built something atop my foundations. Instead, they came, copied, profited, then disappeared without an impact, leaving no legacy behind, no business to pass down, no new knowledge to share. They ain’t control the manufacturing and distribution chain the way the European houses did. To me, that ignorance was most upsetting. We had hip-hop music and fashion on the same trajectory when I was running the boutique, but while hip-hop music kept ascending to greater heights, the hip-hop fashion brands took it downstairs, and that positioned the European brands—Gucci, Versace, Louis—to capitalize on the high end of the hip-hop market.

If you ask me my way of living, I think right makes right. But for me to interact with people and assume that they believe the same thing I do, when they could very well believe the opposite, that might makes right, I’d be a damn fool. I’d be a damn fool to think anyone’s gonna open a door or build me a staircase in the name of equality. You gotta kick the door down yourself.

I was just creating what we liked. I never thought of myself as an artist, or in any fashion-industry terms. I was just getting it on like we get it on. Interpreting how we wanted to feel. I was playing jazz with fashion. When we find a way to interpret our feelings into fashion, we are responding to something chemical in us, as black people, that we are able to tap into.

I see each customer as an actor auditioning to be in this big, generational movie I’m making. We are already working within the shared frame of reference of my designs, and they want to be in the shot. It’s my job to find a comfortable role for them. I never wanna be in that traditional fashion-runway zone, telling people how to feel. I want them to tell me how they feel, and then I want to extract those feelings and build fashion outta that. I want them to feel important and connected to that good energy my clothes give. I want them to wear them knowing they played an active part in their own look. I’m not trying to change nobody. I’m trying to bring out what’s already inside of people. I want to give people what they want before they know they want it. It’s not about the runway, it’s about your way.

Who are you really? How do you really feel? What makes you feel strong? What brings you joy?

When we was their age, problem kids just like them, we’d come down here on a hot summer day and strip down to our underwear, but before we dove in, we had a trick to figure out which way the current was flowing and how hard. It could be too strong if you weren’t careful. What we’d do is take a Popsicle stick and toss it into the river. We’d watch to see how it moved and which direction it went and how fast. After watching the stick float, we’d figure out the best place to leap.

But I’ve always liked that Popsicle-stick trick. I like the ingenuity of taking something meant for one purpose and reusing it for something new. There’s nothing fancy about it, just a small thing that most of us take for granted. It might not look like much to others, but it had value to us. I like the lesson it teaches about resourcefulness, and how being observant can save you from trouble.

You could say that my life has been similar to that Popsicle stick floating in the Harlem River, seen as trash by some but offering something valuable to those paying attention, knocked around by the same tides that carried ships from Africa with my ancestors, riding out ahead so others can figure out the best way to follow, eventually drifting out into the big sea, going where the current takes it. But never going under.