We are fresher than the freshest fresh.
We are fresher than the freshest fresh. CNN Films

Tonight's screening of the much-talked-about documentary Fresh Dressed, which opens the weeklong ByDesign festival, is significant because very few people have actually seen it. There was no press screening for the film, no online screeners offered, and word has it that it will not be released anytime soon. I asked Courtney Sheehan, the program director at Northwest Film Forum, about the movie, about what we might expect to see tonight, as she is one of the few people (and maybe the only person in all of Seattle) who has watched the carefully guarded doc...

In exuberant pursuit of the why behind the what of hip hop fashion, the genealogical method of Fresh Dressed is as smartly executed as its subjects are dressed. Tracing the history of hip hop fashion through slavery, Baptist churches, the distinctive styles of Harlem, the Bronx, Queens, and beyond, Sacha Jenkins (of Mass Appeal) unspools "the backdoor story of hiphop" all the way to the capitalist warfare of carving up the department store floor. With interviews ranging from Dapper Dan, "the hip hop tailor of Harlem," who (in)famously "blackenized" designers like Luis Vuitton in the 80s to Kanye West, decked out in linen as white as the sands of beach upon which he sits, it captures the evolution of fashion that mirrored/paralleled/shaped the evolution of hip hop from turn table-turned-instrument out of necessity to millionaire moguls. Throughout, the soundtrack bounces all the bass beats you want in a hip hop doc.


This sounds very much like something that must not be missed.