‘Fresh Dressed’: A lively documentary about hip-hop style

“How do you rock your hat, man?” a host asks a dancer in a clip from the 1980s hip-hop TV show “Graffiti Rock.” The young man, coolly bopping to the beat in a sleeveless T, gray pants, white sneakers and a Kangol safari hat, casually replies, “I sport it fresh, homes.”

It’s an exchange that both kicks off Sacha Jenkins’ lively documentary about the rise of hip-hop fashion, and gives it a name. “Fresh Dressed” takes us to the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, where b-boys and b-girls danced enthusiastically to the drum “break” section of a song. As the craze spread, different neighborhoods adapted specific looks: Lee jeans and Puma sneakers in Brooklyn, velour sweatsuits in Harlem, a mixture of both in the Bronx. Uniforms were important, and high-end labels mattered; fashion, as former Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley (himself wrapped showily in a fur scarf) notes in the film, has always been “an expression of aspiration.”

With hip-hop in the 1990s came bright colors, baggy jeans (think “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” as a few clips in the film remind us) and designer names like Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. But “Fresh Dressed” lets us hear from numerous other lesser-known designers, many of them African American or Latino, speaking about how they dressed a community. Among the voices is “Dapper Dan,” a famous Harlem tailor known for adapting high-end logo fabric into urban streetwear; “I blackenized it!” he cheerfully explains. And the recent phenomenon of recording artists developing clothing lines is explored: Kanye West, Sean Combs and Pharrell Williams all speak about style. Williams, closing the film, sums things up nicely. “Dress,” he says, “like yourself.”