5 items
A color-blocked leather jacket with a giant black-and-white eight ball on the back, designed by Michael Hoban in 1990 and priced around $800. For two winters it was the status symbol of New York, worn by ballplayers and rappers, robbed off kids' backs, and then dropped so hard that Seinfeld put one on Puddy as a joke.
The baggy, stone-washed French jeans with the loud "M+FG" tabs and straps on the leg. Marithé + François Girbaud were the designer denim of early-90s hip-hop, name-checked by Biggie and worn backwards by Kris Kross, before the brand slid from every mall to the thrift rack.
Jeans worn low enough to show the boxers, the hip-hop look that parents, principals and eventually city councils spent two decades trying to legislate away. Everyone had a theory about where it came from; nobody could prove one.
Mitchell & Ness's faithful remakes of old jerseys, a Jordan, a Dr. J, a Dale Murphy, adopted by hip-hop around the turn of the 2000s. The Philadelphia company's sales went from $2.2 million in 1999 to $36 million in 2003, then dropped after Jay-Z rapped that he didn't wear jerseys anymore.
The wheat-colored, waterproof six-inch work boot from New Hampshire that New York hip-hop turned into a uniform. Unscuffed Timbs with baggy jeans and a Carhartt were the mid-90s look from Wu-Tang to Biggie, and the founder's grandson spent 1993 explaining that the company's customers were "honest working people."