Dapper Dan (designer)

From his 125th Street boutique, open from 1982 to 1992, Dapper Dan remade luxury-house logos into custom jackets and tracksuits for clients such as LL Cool J, Eric B. & Rakim and Salt-N-Pepa, inventing the look of 1980s hip-hop luxury long before the houses courted that customer. In 2017 Gucci showed a jacket strikingly close to one he had made in the 1980s, and the outcry led to a partnership and a Gucci-backed atelier in a Lenox Avenue brownstone. In 2021 he became the first Black designer to receive the CFDA's Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award, a late but fitting correction of the record.