[upbeat music]
[police sirens]
- Okay, hang on.
Now, let's talk about how this really went down.
I went from refashioning fashion
to have fashion refashion me.
I was born and raised
in the poorest section of Harlem.
My first experiences was with crime.
I became a professional gambler
and to be a professional gambler,
you have to be a professional conman.
I knew that I had to dress nice
and keep a pocket full of money,
but I didn't want to be part of that life anymore.
So, I decided that I wanted to open up a store
because I like luxury clothes.
I like expensive stuff.
Silks, alligators, crocodiles, and furs,
and cater to the people who I knew in the community,
the hustle element,
the criminal element,
and sell those types of things.
And that's how it started.
My first store, Dapper Dan's.
I started out like with a small store,
500 square feet.
And I said, you know what?
Since I'm going to be catering to hustlers,
I'll make my store so it could be open 24 hours.
There was nobody selling furs in Harlem, but me.
So right away, I started getting a lot of attention.
And then I knew all the major gangsters.
JAG Jackson was the biggest drug dealer
to come along in Harlem after Nicky Barnes.
One day, he came into the store
and he had a Louis Vuitton pouch,
and everybody was fascinated with the pouch.
And I looked at that pouch and I said to myself,
what is it about that pouch?
I know that ain't nothing but $10 worth of vinyl.
And I looked at it and I said, you know what it is?
It is, it's the symbols.
So I say, you know what?
If I can make garments out of those symbols,
I can have a huge impact.
So after I taught myself textile printing,
that opened up a whole new window for me.
What I did was I would make reversible fur coats.
One side would be fur, and the other side,
I might be Louis Vuitton or Gucci or Fendi.
And that's when just mushroom into it.
Even bigger than when I was in the beginning.
♪ Wear a G on my chest, I don't need Dapper Dan ♪
♪ I'm going to tell you the name of this man ♪
♪ He goes by the name of the Dapper Dan ♪
♪ And yo ♪
♪ You cannot stop a Dan ♪
♪ That was the man back in '88 ♪
There has been a lot of rap lyrics written about me,
but when hip hop started, right,
rappers didn't have any money.
So all the rappers that used to come by the store,
they couldn't afford to even buy what I had.
The rappers liked to be around the gangsters
and like to look like the gangsters
and dress like the gangsters.
So, eventually, as the rap music started to take off,
the rappers started to make more money than the gangsters.
Cause all the gases was going to jail
as rap music was exploding.
LL Cool J, Boogie Down Productions,
Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick.
Outside of New York, everybody wants
to be like New York.
Inside of New York, everybody wants to be like Harlem.
Harlem had that magic.
So goes Harlem.
So goes the whole black cultural world.
It started there, you know.
Diane Dixon was an Olympic track star
who had won gold medals.
And she used to come to the store all the time,
but she was different.
She was way ahead of her time with what she wanted.
And she had this idea.
She said, 'Dap, I want you
to make me something really special.'
I say, okay, what's you want it to look like?
She said, 'I just want it to look high fashion, right?'
So we came up with this concept
that she would have these balloon sleeve.
So I went and got that material,
and I blew the arms up,
and I used mahogany fur,
and then I used a butter-soft Louis Vuitton,
and then put the material out
to give it that effect.
And it worked out amazing.
So when Diane bust out with that,
they didn't know how to take it at first.
And then everybody started saying, wow, wow, wow.
Because it was a lot, you know what I mean?
I could not even imagine
that the look that Diane Dickson wore
would have such an impact on my life, 30 years later.
- Check it out, cuz.
Yo! MTV raps Saturday at 10:00 AM
and 7:00 PM eastern.
- Yo! MTV rap was building
and they were seeing these garments
that I was making.
- This week on Yo! MTV Raps,
we travel to Dapper Dan's all-night boutique.
- And so the brands started, and said,
who the hell is a Dapper Dan?
They started putting everything together,
and finding out where this was coming from.
And that's when the raids started.
The MCL, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton.
Gucci never raided me.
It was those three, basically.
They would come in with a cease and desist order,
meaning that they could take any garments
that they saw that had their logos on it.
And I was losing a lot of money.
They kept raiding me,
raiding me, raiding me.
But I would keep building right back up.
And one day Fendi came to raid me.
Sotomayor, Sonia Sotomayor,
one of the chief justice Supreme court.
At the time she was working for Fendi
and she came on a raid.
I had a coat in there that I had just finished
and it was for Big Daddy Kane.
She looked at that coat and said, wow,
this guy belongs downtown.
She paid me a compliment and then raided the store
and took everything.
All of a sudden everything came to an end.
I refused to give up.
I regrouped myself,
found me an underground place
where I could continue to make clothes
and started all over again.
I would pack everything up in my car
and hit all the major black cities
from New York all the way across to Chicago
and then come back, reload,
and then go all the way down to Atlanta.
And that's how I sustained myself for 20 years underground.
I was the best kept secret.
I think being born broke
and poor was a great asset for me
because starting all over didn't bother me.
I was prepared for the battle.
In 2017, life changed for me.
All of a sudden,
one of my creations popped up on the Gucci runway.
It was the same Diane Dixon look
that I had did 30 years earlier.
I was used to white folks taking stuff from us.
That was a given, you know,
but the new generation said, no,
man, they wasn't having it.
Internet, social media gave people of color voice.
So when people saw that coat, that Gucci made,
there was an uproar.
Next thing I know, my son told me
they want to get in touch with you.
They want to be in the partnership.
So I tell my son, I say, if they serious, I said,
tell them to come to Harlem.
And they came.
Black people say, man,
don't do nothing with Gucci,
don't partner with Gucci.
I grew up in the sixties.
What I've learned, watching the civil rights movement
in the 60's,
that the most important thing
that a person of color can do,
is to get inside,
to have a seat at the table.
That is the most important reason for me taking that deal.
The Gucci deal involved that they would set me up,
make it possible for me to work the same way I worked
when I initially started out 30 years ago.
But the only difference this time,
I would be working with only Gucci fabrication.
We would do a joint project together,
a joint collection together,
and that will go global.
It was the ideal situation.
It made all the sense in the world, to me.
Gucci allowed for me to break Jim Crow barriers in fashion.
So, now my real freedom is coming.
This is going to be the biggest stage of my life.
My plans is to try to work with young designers
and show them how everything I did was connected
to the culture and how to translate culture
because that's the key to what I do.
Translate culture, make it possible for our culture
to continue to have the significant impact
on global fashion it has now.
On the dollar bill,
you see 'e pluribus unum'
and you see what's happening now.
America has the ability to bring us all together.
So I want my legacy to be
that I did something to make that happen.
[upbeat music]