“I was locked up with an older guy from my neighbourhood, Vic,” says Day. Instead, he got one month and used prison as an opportunity to get clean, going cold turkey. He notes in his 2019 memoir, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, that had he been jailed today instead of in the late 60s, before harsh, discriminatory drug laws were implemented, he might have been imprisoned for a lifetime. At 13, he was earning thousands of dollars a day.īy high school, Day and one of his brothers had started using heroin – and in his early 20s, he was arrested for dealing drugs. But Day was also a keen reader and soon began devouring books on “percentages, law of probability and manipulation and sleight of hand”, and became, in his words, “very proficient at it”. “The second was gambling.” He acquired the basics from his uncle, “Fishman Eddie”, who was a professional. “First thing that I learned in life was about the gospel,” he says. Shoe-shining was Day’s first adolescent “hustle”, quickly followed by gambling. “To compare it to anything you see today, it was like the favelas or Soweto.” Day and his three brothers and three sisters would go down with holes in their shoes to the nearby Harlem river to build models from the mud because they couldn’t afford toys. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked three jobs to make ends meet. “That’s why the Harlem renaissance – all these dynamic writers and poets – they were there because they had to be there.” “Even though we had a class that was capable of moving out, segregation wouldn’t allow that,” he says. His parents arrived during the Great Migration, which saw millions of African Americans flee the more overtly racist south in the early 20th century. He remembers when horse-drawn carriages lined the streets of Manhattan. In the process he became a pariah of the fashion industry – and to this day, now aged 76, still one of its great influencers.ĭay was born into poverty in East Harlem in 1944. A pioneer in luxury streetwear, Day screenprinted the monograms of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, MCM and Fendi on to premium leathers to create silhouettes synonymous with early hip-hop style: tracksuits, bomber jackets, baseball and kufi caps. His custom pieces repurposed logos from the fashion houses that had overlooked black clientele. Dapper Dan’s Boutique, the legendary Harlem couturier he opened in 1982, kitted out local gamblers and gangsters, then later hip-hop stars and athletes such as Mike Tyson, Bobby Brown and Salt-N-Pepa. It wouldn’t be until decades later that Day would truly make his name. So it came to be that Day was christened “the new Dapper Dan”. Day was just 13, but had revealed himself to be not only a better craps player than his guide, who was the original Dapper Dan, but also a better dresser. I t was a mentor on the gambling circuit in Harlem, New York, who gave Daniel Day the moniker that would make him famous.
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