Snake America Seventy Six
Snake is a bi-weekly newsletter covering after-market goods. This week: the Big Daddy Kane Fendi Dapper Dan suit and a Nike lunchbag. Subscribe for emails.
eBay: Scoob Lover Big Daddy Kane Fendi Dapper Dan suit, $5,000: First things first: new Fendi suits list for surprisingly less than the asking price here. You can buy a jacket on ssense for $1700 or an odd-end on Yoox for half that. So I guess they are like $3,000. I can't find any to buy on Fendi.com without drawing blood. Vintage suits, or any suits that are not new ... require an altogether more thorough understanding of haberdashery than your humble narrator possesses. This Fendi suit above is not truly Fendi but Dapper Dan, the New York bootlegger tailor who cut suits and jackets and hats in the 80s with the logos of luxury houses. You may have seen the rapper Rakim in one of Dan's Louis Vuitton or Gucci sweatsuits. Or you may have read the New Yorker profile of Dapper Dan. Or you have have seen Alpo, the drug dealer that the Cam'ron movie is about in one of Dan's jackets. The New Yorker describes the jacket as "a beautiful tan-and-brown Louis Vuitton logo-print snorkel parka with a fox-fur hood. (It had cleverly designed double pockets in the front, just in case the wearer had something he might want to store separately or discard quickly.) ... commonly known as the Alpo Coat, ... one of the boutique’s signature creations—a crack-era classic." It is the best jacket of all time:
What a coat. This abovementioned is a double-breasted, I think, suit with the Fendi double F logo all over. Not as cool as Alpo's jacket but better than the field of all suits. It's also less important than Alpo's jacket. You may have seen Scoob Lover, who was Big Daddy Kane's male dancer(2) wear the jacket on Kane's album, "It's A Big Daddy Thing." Or, wearing just the pants as he cuts Kane's hair, memorialized in a photo that is easily available (and in the abovelinked auction). I looked it up and Karl Lagerfeld invented the Fendi logo. He told The New York Times in 2013 that "it stood for fun fur." He's French, and those are not French words, though fourure, French for fur, fits the bill. But who's to quibble? I bet that's what he was thinking. Fendi started in 1925 in Paris and Lagerfeld joined 40 years later at 31 or 32. Man ... The New Yorker piece describes how Dan's designs steered those luxury labels to the direction they're at now.
Check out Scoob's code name. Discogs.com says Big Daddy Kane chose the first two words of his name from Vincent Price's character in Frankie Avalon's "Beach Party" (USA 1963). That teen movie where Price plays a club owner. I am not sure if rappers still name themselves after Vincent Price characters. Per Price's iMDB page, some of the characters he played were named Benakon, Romero, The Captain, Dr. Goldfoot, Seltzer Water Clown and Boss Tweed, none of which are good names for a rapper. Kane picked the best one. Before reading the list I thought it may be that the only bad thing about rap music right now is that too few rappers name themselves after Vincent Price's characters. But they don't, and good on them. It's one more reason why rap is better now than it has ever been, and why it gets better every day. You can't say that about anything else these days besides The New York Times, microprocessors and how strong professional athletes are.
eBay: Nike shoe bag, 1970s, pinwheel: The last pair of a purported 1970s Nike shoe bag from a Japan-based seller who doesn't ship to Japan and "may not ship to Italy." I want to say in the first listing of this auction it was listed as a Lunch bag. I don't think there is overlap in the Venn diagram of Nike collectors and Lunch box collectors. Nike has a few bags like these, like the Gucci sneaker bags or the ones for purses, but none explicitly designated for Lunch. These were for waffle trainers. I was dubious Nike made Lunch bags back then, since the company was being run out of Phil Knight's 1964 lime green Plymouth Valiant, and who has room for those--and why would he be taking his Lunch with him when he could just hit Burgerville or Elmer's or something since he was driving everywhere. Knight's car's make and year might be the ultimate piece of Nike trivia, though that information is not too hard to find--it took me one minute. I think a more difficult question would be who played drums on his son's rap record. It'd be funny if someone liked Nike so much that they only drove 1964 Plymouth Valiants. Anyways, the bag says "sports" on it, so it is of that era. I haven't seen one with a pinwheel ever. People talked like that back then.
Thanks for reading.
Snake.
ERRATA: In Snake 75, I wrote that my dad worked with this guy who wrote the defining book about, "commerce in Haiti" and off that he got a tenure-track gig at Queens University on that book, without a PhD. The man in question, David Eltis, has a PhD (University of Rochester, 1979) and his area of expertise was the abolishment of slavery. The name of the book that got him that shine was Economic Growth and The Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, published by Oxford in 1987. It was about England abolishing slavery. New York Review of Books says of the book:
"A work of prodigious and meticulous scholarship, Eltis's book will be studied and debated well into the next century....Eltis's provocative arguments will require historians to reconsider the entire Anglo-American antislavery movement as well as the place of coerced labor in an emerging industrial and free market Atlantic world."
Eltis is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History at Emory University. The last time my dad saw him he was at Queens. Eltis' honors and accomplishments are too numerous to mention here. Snake regrets the error.
Last Snake: Nike track pants, Shenandoah valley pottery book (still for sale; still for sale)
Snake Before That: The story I broke that City Subs would be open two Tuesdays ago (it's open and fucking rocks, I went last Saturday)
(1) I felt like 50 Cent ripped off Alpo's life in his movie but he didn't. I think it was that he took his name from 50 Cent the bankrobber and his story from Rick Ross? Or it might have just been the prison guard and rapper Rick Ross who did that. Speaking of 50 Cent's film, which I saw opening night, in the scene where he's a little kid, the little kid wears all white with green Jordan IVs -- even though those weren't around back then. Curtis Jackson was born in 1975, too, and the kid version of him he references wasn't of Bar Mitzvah age. So he shouldn't be wearing any Jordan IVs. BUT: the actor who played young Marcus was 14 or so during shooting. I still think it was a mistake. Besides that infinitesimal oversight the movie is unimpeachable.
(2) Scoob was listed on the album as a dancer and also goes by Johnny Famous, and did a documentary about his dance career with Damon Dash, who himself is a great dancer.