The Hippest Trip in America (10 page)

Chapter 7
Stylin'

OVER THE
years, whenever
Soul Train
is used as a pop culture reference—be it in
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
in 1988 or
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
in 1994 or the
Charlie's Angels
movie in 2000—it always evokes a time of platform shoes, applejack caps, and bell-bottoms, as if the show exists as a style time capsule of 1970s funkiness. The holy trinity of
Soul Train
's appeal was music, dance, and fashion: both the Soul Train Gang and the performing guest artist let loose with freaky, fantastic threads that have been much imitated, parodied, but never quite duplicated.

One of the future fashion figures influenced by
Soul Train
was a white kid from Corpus Christi, Texas, named Todd Oldham, who became a force in American fashion after being named top new fashion talent by the Council of Fashion Designers in 1991. Oldham's playful vision, both in design and on camera, have made him a staple of American runways and national TV. His work as former creative director for Old Navy, his line for Target, and his role as a host for shows on MTV and Bravo speak to Oldham's mass appeal.

 

Labelle's flamboyant dress was matched by the intensity of their
Soul Train
performances.

 

He recalled growing up in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s “when the color lines were not quite as blurry as they are now,” but that “thankfully, for that great moment that
Soul Train
was on, everything was cool. I can't tell you how many line dances my sister and I did down the living room with the TV.”

As a child, Oldham was developing his own sense of what constituted good fashion sense, and
Soul Train
helped define it for him.

 

Oldham:
Loads and loads of high-waisted pants were sort of the moment for
Soul Train
, a very long moment actually. Whether you were a guy or a girl, it just worked. You could do anything in them. I think the manufacturer was called Angel Flight, and their trick was that they cut pants without side seams. The seams went up the front and kind of arched on the back for extra movement. But you had to wear it with your great little puffy shirt and your short elastic things. All through the seventies, those super-high-waisted pants really worked. I know
Soul Train
helped magnify it, but I think it was a style that had been resonating for a while. Up until about the mid-1970s is when we lost this mass cooperation with our public psyche. At that point seventy-year-old insurance men were wearing pants the same as a young kid. We don't get that cooperation anymore. So you had everybody tweaking and interpreting one silhouette.

 

Bright colors were a huge part of the 1970s
Soul Train
fashion palette, which was happening in mainstream design but “really kind of reflects what was going on in ethnic fashion,” Oldham believes.

 

Oldham:
It started making acceptable things like tighter clothes on men and some of those colors. I mean the colors are kind of freaky. It's hard to talk people into wearing lime pantsuits now. It was a lot easier at that time, apparently. There was always a kind of simple classic form with the clothes on
Soul Train
, but there was always a kind of unusual detail, like some of the embroideries. Always had some sort of ‘I visited Morocco' thing going on. And then there were the colors. Everything was so seriously turned up. Like weird, off colors. Like a giant pancreas on the stage. I don't know if it was propriety or what exactly made people's decisions, but it was a much more free approach. It was daring, but they didn't seem to be as concerned at trying to be acceptable.

 

Classic seventies fashion and hair.

 

A feature that really caught the embryonic designer was that many couples on the show wore the same outfits. Oldham says, “People were there together. That's what made it work. It kind of magnified the moves when your outfits are the same, and it wasn't exactly androgynous dressing, even though they're the same clothes.”

Oldham's eye for style made him fascinated by Don Cornelius's choices. His thoughts are not always flattering, but they are amusing.

 

Oldham:
His clothes kind of looked like drawings of clothes, because they were polyester at the time, and they almost looked like flat cutouts if you look closely—because they were kind of poured clothes. So he has a strange presence . . . Don Cornelius never looked like the dancers. He certainly had the same fibers on, but he definitely didn't look like them. He kind of looked like the dad in the room. His suits, even though some of the dancers had on suits, weren't moving in quite the same ways. He was a little bit, I don't want to say stiff, but formal. There was a formality to him. He couldn't always mask that he wasn't a big fan of some of the guests on the show. I think every designer to some degree is influenced by what happened on
Soul Train,
even if you weren't born or you knew it ambiently. That was such a cultural zeitgeist of change, of new ideas, new momentum, it was really important. So whether you can trace your lines back to
Soul Train,
the veins are back into
Soul Train
for sure.

 

Lloyd Boston, who grew up in New Jersey and caught the show on the local New York station, noted that hair was an essential component of
Soul Train
style, especially the resplendent Afros of dancers and performers. “It was a leveling device that African Americans in the 1970s used to connect with each other,” said the former Tommy Hilfiger art director and
The View
show regular.

 

Boston:
Going back to the hair God gave you versus the hair that we're trying to create to assimilate . . . Almost like a halo. A crown.
Soul Train
became almost this living gallery of Afros—short, huge. Some were perfectly shaped. Some were picky. Some were short and red. Some were dyed. Some were wigs. I think that moment was so important because it showed you that anybody could do this. But if you look at some of the earlier episodes, you have to remember that 1972 looked very different from 1979. So in the earlier couple of years, you saw the kind of struggle between traditional black hair or natural black hair crossing paths with folks who had processed hair. You would see a few girls and guys with huge naturals, and then you would see a few girls and guys with processed hair. They all kind of coexisted together. So you saw girls who were trying to look like Marcia Brady next to girls that were trying to look like Angela Davis, and they were right there, whether they were in miniskirts or dashikis.

 

Like Oldham, Boston was taken by the boldness of the fashion choices, particularly by the male dancers. Boston suggested some of the dancers on the show were “embracing a slightly more effeminate style than you might see on the street . . . You would see guys on
Soul Train
wearing those skin-tight fishnet tank tops. You would see those spray-can-fit pants. You would say ‘spray can' because you were proud to show your manhood at that time, and they would fit, and they would flair out at the bottom so you can move and groove and absolutely show the sexiness.”

But, despite all the funky flair of the dancers, the show's host maintained his own, more dignified style of dress.

 

Boston:
One thing you notice, though—Don Cornelius never touched that style. He was always respectable—almost an alderman, if you will. He looked like a community leader. His suits were always impeccable, though. When I think about his style, I remember his peaked lapels. Those hand-tied velvet bow ties. You know, it almost looked like prom pictures that we would see our parents or our older cousins wearing. His 'fro was always perfect. Those tinted glasses that would be like amber or mango. He would have some interesting shades.

 

A few of the female dancers, particularly Fawn Quinones, devised a mash-up of 1970s glam with iconic 1940s touches, very similar to what the female family vocal group the Pointer Sisters were working with. “So they kind of did this blend, this melding of vintage style,” said Boston. “Shape cropped jackets with high-rolled shoulders. Back-seam stockings and platform Mary Janes. It was almost a take on the Andrews Sisters. Fawn would always carry an exotic fan, and her hair would be in rolls like an old switchboard operator in tight jackets and snug pencil skirts.”

 

Classic eighties fashion and hair.

 

Black style, whether zoot suits in the 1940s or Afrocentric colors in the 1980s, have always had an impact on fashion around the globe. But in Boston's estimation,
Soul Train
has a special place as a style transmitter.

 

Boston:
Soul Train
is the first time our unique style expression was televised. The same way MTV launched punk and rock style in the 1980s,
Soul Train
did for black style in the 1970s. It may not have been in as many homes around the nation or around the world, but those trends were just made bigger than the album cover, bigger than the eight-track cassette label . . . You could take your cues: “I would love to try that. I need to layer a leather jacket over that. Oh my God, a dashiki with some culottes would be fantastic.” It only takes one person to start a trend. The fact that these individuals who were expressing themselves, as teenagers do, could now reach millions of homes, they could inspire teenagers everywhere.

The peak of
Soul Train
's fashion impact was those golden years of the seventies. With the rise of hip-hop and music videos in the eighties, a more casual, streetwise aesthetic would replace LA glitz, while videos would become the way new fashions would be communicated to young people. Still, today you can't think back to the seventies without visions of bell-bottoms and bushy Afros filling your mind.

 

DANCER PROFILE:
Sam Solomon

 

Growing up in Fresno, California, a young man named Sam Solomon was a fan of 1960s dances like the jerk, the twist, and the flowing moves called the boogaloo. Sam also was a great observer of how people moved, be it a wino on the corner or a handicapped man with a distinctive walk. Giving himself the handle Boogaloo Sam, he moved down to Long Beach, California, in 1978. Along with his younger brother Popin' Pete Solomon, he formed a dance crew that included colorfully named Creepin' Sid, Puppet Boozer, Electric Boogaloo, and the Robot Dane. They called themselves the Electric Boogaloos.

What Sam created was a move he called popping. “Popping is flexing of the muscles in rhythm to the beat,” Popin' Pete explained. “It's been given wrong names like pop locking, electric boogie, flexing, but it's just called poppin' because the original guys, they would do the moves, and they would just say ‘Pop, Pop, Pop.' Just make that sound that they thought that this would be making if they could put sound effects on it. The boogaloo is more fluid. Poppin' is this hard-core move, where boogaloo is this groove dance.”