Radical Chic redux

Along with the natural/afro hair, politicized hip-hop style, and authentic African names that I think an Obama candidacy and presidency is going to bring to the forefront, I'm starting to wonder if some Black Power-influenced style is going to come back in 2009.

I mentioned in this post that I think the color black in general is going to only get more pervasive, and that in the winter the classic black turtleneck is going to be huge. I'm also imagining lots of sober, simply-cut (minimalist) black jackets, suits, and coats, and flat black boots. And I'm thinking that the camouflage trend of this winter/spring is only going to get bigger and encompass a generally militant-ish look. Plus, I continue to insist, long hair for men. Add to that a dumbing-down of (or maybe even dispensing-with?) makeup (here, here), the continuation of skinny jeans, the not-dying popularity of sunglasses, especially still the Wayfarers, the seemingly-random turban and hats-in-general trend, and it's all sounding a little familiar:

...Christ, if the Panthers don't know how to get it all together, as they say, the tight pants, the tight black turtlenecks, the leather coats, Cuban shades, Afros. But real Afros, not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall--but like funky, natural, scraggly . . . wild . . .

...The Panther women...are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they'd stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because "the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes." God knows the Panther women don't spend thirty minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners . . . (from Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers ©1970 by Tom Wolfe)

Of course Black Power overtones are exactly the last thing Barack Obama needs, so I hope this doesn't come back too strong or too soon. Hopefully not really until he's in office. And I really, really hope it'll be about black pride instead of black separatism.

Ideally it will represent, also, not the nihilistic defeated attitude of 1969, but a non-materialistic, honest attitude, and be part of a sweeping-away of the overconsumption-oriented style that has reigned for almost this entire first decade of the 21st century.