Funk

Glamour and fine dressing have always been central to black culture. One need only think about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s photographed and described by Carl Van Vechten. The direct heirs to that tradition included Little Richard, who was excessive and outrageous during the 1950s with his hair in a pompadour, satin suits, and showy make-up, and Sly Stone, who appeared at Woodstock in a leather outfit with very long fringes. They contributed to the spread of a style that was already sufficiently sensational. But what seemed to come out of the ghettos in a visual way in the 1970s was totally new. Tom Walke gave us a lively account of it in his 1974 essay Funk But Chic, describing a new generation of Beau Brummels and Gentlemen of Leisure in Pyramid two-tone shoes with four-inch heels worn with swaying Art Deco bell-bottoms and enormous eyeglasses. In the late 1960s, funk style could consist, for example, of the frequent use of suede-fringed vests and shell necklaces instead of a shirt, or the combination of a blouse draped in a 1940s style with 15 pieces of leather held together by knots in order to make a pair of pants. In the first half of the 1970s, the outrageous costumes worn by Patti Labelle and Nona Hendryx and by the Parliament-Funkadelic group seemed to come from another planet. The Labelle girls, dressed by Larry Le Gaspi, embodied the ideal of futurist amazons. The Parliament-Funkadelic group displayed sci-fantasy gear revisited in a glam key. Both were perfectly in sync with the parallel phenomenon of glitter rock.