“It’s Called Fashion, Look it Up” – Transcript

[INTRO/MUSIC PLAYING]

VERONICA CAREY
But we do have the ability to change the world.

PAUL FLANAGAN
In my world, I’ve never anticipated easy.

AROUTIS FOSTER
We’re also trying to change the paradigm.

CHARLES COOK
We’re more than just a collection of hammers and saws.

KRISTEN BETTS
It is such an exciting opportunity to really change brains.

JOE HANCOCK
We always lose touch with common things that everyone uses and where they come from.

MAURICE BAYNARD
Welcome to Drexel’s 10,000 Hours Podcast. Our goal is to mine the stories behind our region’s innovators, inventors, and thought creators. We’ll be talking to experts in subjects from fashion to neuroscience to find out where their passion for work and inspiration for ideas comes from. I’m your host, Maurice Baynard.

JOE HANCOCK
We always lose touch with common things that everyone uses and where they come from. And why are they so important to our culture? That’s what I’m fascinated by. That’s what drew me to fashion, too.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAURICE
Joe Hancock knows a thing or two about fashion. Joe is a leader in fashion scholarship, writing and editing several books and acting as the executive director for events for the popular culture, American Culture Associations. He’s the program director for Drexel University’s online MS in retail and merchandising. Joe is also the world’s foremost authority on cargo pants and to put it mildly, a big personality. Talk to me about where you grew up.

JOE
OK.

MAURICE
Where it was in the world and what it was like.

JOE
I was born and raised in Kansas. Was there until I was about 13, 14 years old. And then my mom and I moved to South Bend, Indiana. So I moved to Indiana, finished high school there. And then from there I went to undergraduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

And then I moved to Chicago. Lived there for a couple of years. And then I moved back to Bloomington, got my master’s degree. And this was before the days of online education so if you wanted to get that master’s degree you had to move to where the university was.

MAURICE
Actually go to the place.

JOE
Exactly.

MAURICE
What were your degrees in, in undergrad and graduate school?

JOE
So my undergraduate is in apparel merchandising. And then my master’s degree that I went back and got for was apparel merchandising with the focus in diversified management. I got my master’s degree in the mid ’90s, like 1996 is when I was finished. And there was a book by Roosevelt Thomas that came out in about 1992 that was Beyond Race And Gender Diversity in the Workplace, which is hysterical to me because we’re still talking about diversity in the workplace.

But that fascinated me, the whole idea of diversity being a topic of the workplace and how important it is to have these multicultural folks in the workplace and we should respect who they are. And me being a member of the GLBT community, of course it really fascinated me. Especially in the fashion industry which I think overall has been pretty much accepting over the years. From there I finished that degree. And then I went on to Ohio State University and I got my PhD in consumer sciences, with focuses in cultural studies.

So I’m still fascinated with that whole ideology of multiculturalism and cultural studies. And then my other minor was in communications. So really focusing on, not so much mass communications. I’m actually one of those people that does weird research.

I actually look at hermeneutics and semiotics and what things mean and how they can mean different things to different people depending on who’s looking at them. And I always warn my students, you know, I can only look at this and give you the interpretation from a white gay male. This is my interpretation of this symbol. It can mean other things to other people.

MAURICE
So it seems like you knew what you really wanted to do from a really young age. When did you get interested in fashion and merchandising?

JOE
I got interested in fashion actually in high school. We always forget that the mall used to be the center of the social universe.

MAURICE
That’s true.

JOE
And so I’m a child of the ’80s. So before there was social media, there was the mall. And so I really–

MAURICE
I’ve got to stop you and ask, what was your favorite store in the mall?

JOE
OK, so my favorite store I went to work for. It was County Seat.

MAURICE
Right.

JOE
It was a retailer that doesn’t exist anymore. They sold jeans. And I was fascinated. There was a brand of– there are a few brands of jeans in the ’80s that I like, but there was one brand that I was really fascinated by and that’s brand called Girbaud.

And they sold those jeans, so you know I wore those jeans and I liked them. And they also sold a brand called Bugle Boy. I don’t know if you remember Bugle Boy.

MAURICE
Everybody remembers Bugle Boy. I think I had a jacket.

JOE
Yep. And then Guess was pop–

MAURICE
Absolutely.

JOE
Guess had their heyday back then. And so I started working there. And I think one of the things that really fascinated me more about– my students always where you’ve– I’ve always been into clothes. I like fashion and I like clothing. But one of the things I like about fashion the most, and this is probably what’s driven me through my entire career, is the, again, the different types of people that work in fashion. And the fact that as a young kid in the ’80s, being a gay kid in the ’80s, I was somewhat teased, bullied maybe.

And the mall and the people that worked there and especially my first bosses, my first female bosses that I had, they were very accepting people. And I come from an accepting family. That’s a win for me too. Both my parents have been– were always great.

But I just think I found solace and a place that I felt like I belonged in the mall. Which, what went along with that was fashion. So I think that that is kind of, the two go hand-in-hand for me. But I think it was having this interest of liking clothing and liking fashion with these other people that also accepted me that kept me on that path.

MAURICE
So as I recall mall culture, so it wasn’t just being at the mall. But it’s, you got dressed up to go to the mall.

JOE
Absolutely.

MAURICE
It was a big deal on Saturday. You had to have the right things on.

JOE
Yep.

MAURICE
Just to go and sit in the food court.

JOE
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the thing I liked about it. I liked the fact that I could dress up, it was a show place for me. And that I would go there. I was working– I was all that and a bag of chips because I was working there.

MAURICE
There’s no question about it.

JOE
So when you’re working there, you know–

MAURICE
You get the discount.

JOE
Exactly.

MAURICE
So people love you.

JOE
And what’s weird is, the folks– and you know, even the folks in high school that may have been a little tough on me, once they knew I worked at the mall I was a different person.

MAURICE
Right.

JOE
So it elevated me to a new law.

MAURICE
Because working at the mall had a certain gravitas.

JOE
Exactly.

MAURICE
How did you get that job? Like, did you just walk in and ask for the manager?

JOE
I did. Well, I shopped there. And later on I walked in and said, hey, I want to work there.

MAURICE
Was there something that happened while you had that first job that made you say, you know what? There’s no question I want to do this for the rest of my life.

JOE
Oh, I thought– I had Linda. Linda and Sharon are my first two managers, and Lisa. I thought they were so cool. They loved to go to the tanning salon. They smoked. They–

MAURICE
Wait, what did they smoke? Were they like Marlboro Girls?

JOE
Just cigarettes, no, yeah, Marlboro Girls. Out the back door of the store you know, they were so cool. And they just, they loved everybody. And they had friends that came in that I could tell were gay men. And they were so nice to them.

And I just knew that these ladies were very accepting. And I knew that they were who I wanted to be. And they had gone to college. And I was like, you can go to college and do this? And they’re like, oh, yeah,

But I realized that they were doing something I wanted to do. What was interesting is, is for a while, what a lot of people don’t know about me, for a while I wasn’t going to go to school. I was actually going to stay in this mall, because they always tell me, you know, you have management potential.

And at one point I was going to become a manager but it was one of my managers, Sharon, who said nope. You know what? You need to go to school. This is always going to be here.

So I actually went to my guidance counselor. And she said, have I got the school for you when I said that I think I want to go to school and study fashion. And she said, I’ve got the perfect school for you. And she sent my mom and I to Indiana University to open house, and the rest is history.

MAURICE
Wow. What did your mother do?

JOE
My mother started out as a grade school teacher. She taught second grade and then she taught four, five and six special math. And told me never to become a teacher and here I am a professor today.

MAURICE
And that’s like, you’re a teacher. You married your mother’s job and what you loved.

JOE
Yeah, exactly. And then my father, I’ll tell you this. I wasn’t very close with my father. But we did have a relationship. My father actually never went to college. He actually got his– he was a barber, got a barbering license.

And he actually eventually went on to own schools of cosmetology. He had six schools of cosmetology and he taught classes on hair. So both of my parents actually in and of themselves were teachers. So I actually kind of followed along.

MAURICE
So it’s the family business.

JOE
Yeah. And I think my love– just so everyone knows my love, this is something I do not talk about usually at all. My love of retailing really comes from two people, my father’s father who passed away when I was very young– five years old, I think five or six.

He had a sporting goods store. And I thought it was the coolest thing. And it burnt. He died and it burned. And he died in the fire.

MAURICE
What was the name of the store?

JOE
Hancock Orchards– they not only had a sporting goods store but they also were peach farmers. The Hancock Store peach farmers. So they had peaches. And then on the flip side, my mom’s mother worked at a thrift store, like a church thrift store. And my mom’s mother used to watch me a lot and she would take me to the thrift store with her.

And I would sit in the back and play with all the toys that people brought in for donations. And I just thought it was the coolest thing that they had this store and people came in and bought things. It was like a Salvation Army but it was a local thing in Wellington, Kansas.

And I used to just go in there and hang out and sit in the racks and all that kind of stuff, with all this used clothing. And I was just fascinated by it. And I think that those two things in my childhood, I always think back now that I’m older, really influenced the fact that I love the store, the setting of the store.

MAURICE
You’re all about the store.

JOE
I am.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAURICE
So you’re there. You’re in middle America.

JOE
Right.

MAURICE
And when we think of fashion, at least in the more formal sense, I think of the coasts.

JOE
Yep, yep, yep.

MAURICE
I mean, I think of California, I think of New York. But I don’t really think of middle America as being a high fashion place. I guess I think everybody’s wearing boots and very practical clothing.

JOE
Well, they have a different style. I think people don’t really understand the Midwest as far as the fashion–

MAURICE
We don’t.

JOE
–aesthetics goes. There is an aesthetic there that is nowhere else. And the thing of it is is, mid-westerners like their clothes. They are fashionable people. Chicago is a very fashionable city. And we forget that the bulk of clothing is sold in the Midwest.

West coast and the east coast are large, but the bulk of fashion is sold in the Midwest. The one thing is, is I think women’s fashion is a lot larger in its sales because I think more women, of course, shop in the Midwest. I think men in the Midwest are not so fa– I think you find more men interested in fashion on the east and west coast than you do in the Midwest because men in the Midwest are more drawn to things like cars, sports. I think it’s more of, I would say this. Men in the Midwest, I mean, most of my cousins drive $50,000 pickup trucks. I mean–

MAURICE
Right.

JOE
And so their money is more not so much into clothing but more into cars, boats, trucks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I just think it’s a different ideology. In New York not everybody has a car. I think that in New York you have the man who will pay $1,000 for a pair of shoes because his feet are his car.

MAURICE
So we wear our pick up truck.

JOE
You wear your pickup truck, absolutely. And that’s why I think there’s more expenditure on fashionable items and luxury items on the coast. But mass merchants do most of their business in the Midwest.

MAURICE
In the Midwest. Is there a fashion trend, current, that you really wish would go away?

JOE
You ask me this?

MAURICE
Yeah. Do you pick favorites?

JOE
I have a favorite. I have my own favorites.

MAURICE
OK, tell me about your favorite and we’ll back into–

JOE
Well, of course–

MAURICE
–the one that you really don’t like.

JOE
Of course my favorite is cargo pants because of my–

MAURICE
We’ve got to talk about cargo pants.

JOE
–dissertation on cargo pants. But–

MAURICE
We will get there.

JOE
Probably my least favorite fashion right now, I have a list of I hope they don’t come back. And they’re not so much fashions as styles.

MAURICE
Here they are.

JOE
Ice wash denim does not need to come back. The reason why is one, it’s not good for the environment and two, it’s just ugly. Two, the mullet. The mullet!

Professional up front, party in the back– don’t need that anymore. It needs to never come back again.

MAURICE
I was a fan of the mullet.

JOE
You were a fan of the mullet?

MAURICE
On other people, not on me.

JOE
OK.

MAURICE
I really enjoyed it.

JOE
I didn’t see very many black people wearing the mullet.

MAURICE
It wasn’t popular in the African-American community for some reason.

JOE
Exactly. And then the other one that I hope that never comes back is, I just was never a fan of elastic. And actually this has come back– elastic bottomed pants.

MAURICE
Oh, that gather at the ankle?

JOE
That gather at the ankle, which has come back. Now we’re going to go back to what you said. That’s probably my least favorite thing, is the gathered bottom joggers that are big right now.

MAURICE
Yes, yes.

JOE
Like you’re wearing.

MAURICE
Yes.

JOE
Yes.

MAURICE
They sell them now at like, Old Navy.

JOE
They sell them everywhere.

MAURICE
Yeah, like that’s a thing.

JOE
And all the designers do them.

MAURICE
It’s absolutely a thing.

JOE
And I think that they– and I have to tell everybody this. I think they’re an evolutionary process off of the mom jean. They go along with this whole ideology of athleisurewear. I think athleisurewear is very popular. I don’t think–

MAURICE
Absolutely. So we all wear leisurewear everywhere.

JOE
Yeah, but what’s weird is, in menswear, if you look at menswear, what’s going on is the blazer, the suit is back. You see a lot of brands selling suits again, like Bonobos. Like the suit has come back. So it’s really weird to me that we have this thing of athleisurewear that’s popular with women, but the suits come back for men. So I think it’s really strange what’s going on.

MAURICE
It is. OK, what is the difference between fashion and style?

JOE
OK, so fashion is a prevailing clothing style that’s worn at a particular time. So right now we would say joggers are fashion, right? A style is how you put things together.

MAURICE
Got it.

JOE
Does that make sense?

MAURICE
It does, it does.

JOE
So like in the ’80s, I always say this. So my students always want a distinction. So in the ’80s you had the preppy look, right? So you had people wearing the preppy look different ways. So for example, MTV generation in the ’80s, you had the rap culture that was coming out at the time.

Rappers wore preppy, but they wore it baggy, they wore it bigger. That was the style of wearing it. Where you had the traditional preppy who wore everything fitted. It’s the same look, but stylized differently.

MAURICE
Right. So who’s your favorite fashion designer?

JOE
I would, hands–

MAURICE
At the moment.

JOE
Hands down– well, always for me, it has always been Ralph Lauren.

MAURICE
And why is that?

JOE
I like Ralph Lauren for the same reason I talked about multiculturalism. When we say Ralph Lauren we think WASP, and I don’t think we should think that because we have a Jewish man who’s the head of design there. And I think the company overall is very philanthropic to differences and multiculturalism. So that’s why I like the brand. He was one of the first major brands to feature a black model, Tyson Beckford, in his advertising.

MAURICE
I remember.

JOE
And banked an entire division, polo sport, on that advertising campaign. So we have to give him credit for that because he pushed it to the market with a black model. So one of the first to do that when most people would not feature black models because the sales had indicated that people buy more off of white models than black models. So he took that chance.

When he had the rugby line, he actually had kids from the Harvey Milk school design tote bags which he sold at rugby. So I think that he represents some sort of multiculturalism that we don’t expect from him. We expect him to be WASPy. But it’s just strange to me that he does all these multicultural things. And what’s interesting, too, is a large portion of the black community where polo.

MAURICE
Yeah, absolutely. So I was wondering– so it’s interesting, they do, but I don’t know if they associate it with Ralph Lauren. I don’t know if the ads in, say, GQ are what’s driving people to go and buy Ralph Lauren.

JOE
No. And this will reel us in to cargo pants.

MAURICE
Here we go.

JOE
So–

MAURICE
I knew we were getting there.

JOE
What’s happened is– no, really, what’s happened is, is generationally consumers start to not remember or start to forget what things mean.

MAURICE
Right.

JOE
So for example, if you go up to students today and you say, where did the t-shirt come from? They have no idea. Or if you say, you know, where did the polo shirt come from? Ralph Lauren. No, it didn’t. It came from Rene Lacoste. It was designed for Rene Lacoste as a tennis shirt.

MAURICE
Yes.

JOE
And it spun off from that. Where do cargo pants come from? Abercrombie and Fitch. No, sorry, Abercrombie and Fitch didn’t invent cargo pants. Right?

So I think generationally as time goes on, we forget where things come from. And each generation has a tendency to not understand the historical significance of something nor do I think they really care. I mean I’m stealing this from Vivienne Westwood. She said, the 20th century was a mistake because the whole ideology was to erase the past and move into the future. And we don’t want to know what happened to people or we don’t want to know what happened to things.

And I agree with her. We should remember things. We should remember where things come from. Because if you forget your history you have a tendency to repeat it again, right? But in fashion she said, no one remembers where anything comes from. And so when they think that the designer has invented this fashion, no one is really inventing new things.

They’re just borrowing from history and borrowing from different style and they’re recombobulating it to their brand image and they’re presenting it to us as if it’s new. So with cargo pants I was fascinated with this idea that young people were wearing this pant but when I would walk up to them and say, where do cargo pants come from? They weren’t saying the military. To me that was like a no brainer.

They were saying Abercrombie and Fitch and Old Navy. So that’s why I decided to do my study, is this concept of where does something come from? And cargo pants hadn’t been done before. And why are they so popular? And that’s what I did for my dissertation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAURICE
When was the cargo pant invented, who invented it, and why?

JOE
Well OK.

MAURICE
I feel like you’re the only person on the planet who knows this answer.

JOE
No. I don’t know the answer, that’s the thing. No one does. They were invented, we think, about between– I keep finding things that are conflicting. So like 1934 it’s about 1936, somebody gets the idea in the military to say, hey, we should put these pockets on these pants. And I went to a source. I went to Virginia, to Fort Lee, to their military museum and they have the first pair of cargo pants.

MAURICE
The very first pair.

JOE
Not the very– one of the first pairs, right?

MAURICE
Right, to ever be deployed.

JOE
Yes, to be deployed. Now today, we would probably know today who invented them because they’re labeling and that type of thing. But back then? No idea who did it. But we know that they didn’t come out until about World War II. That’s the first war where they’re being used because if you look at World War I you don’t see them.

But where they come from, probably the United States. And the reason why I say that is because of this. During the war years we were not fighting war in our country. It was being fought everywhere else, right? People forget, at one time we were China. We were manufacturing everything. So yeah, so we were a center of production.

So we were probably making uniforms for other countries as well because they had battles in their countries. We were making the uniforms for their soldiers because they couldn’t make them. They were fighting the war in their country. So we were probably producing uniforms for multiple countries. So England and the United States are the first countries where you see them pop up.

MAURICE
Is there something that people fail to ask you, given your expertise in fashion and merchandising, that you really wish they would ask?

JOE
I think that we don’t give enough credit to the people that work daily in retail stores. I think that we think it’s a very easy job. And what we forget is, how does all that product get onto the floor, get sized, get organized? How does it get put together so that we at least want to buy it?

And how do we respect the people that literally wait on the public all the time? And I think instead of– some countries have military service as a form of living in their country. I think we should stick everyone in a retail store for one year of their life.

MAURICE
Everybody should work retail at least once.

JOE
Yeah, and have to deal with the public in that capacity. We always assume it’s someone that doesn’t have much intelligence, or they never went to school, or they don’t know what they’re doing.

MAURICE
Right.

JOE
So that’s one thing that I wish people would talk about a little bit more because I think it’s really important. And I also think that we also have to remember that a lot of the people doing those jobs aren’t making a lot of money, and probably are supporting their families. I think that’s an important aspect to think about.

MAURICE
Joe Hancock. This has been great. I could do this with you all day.

JOE
Yeah.

MAURICE
We might have to have you come back and do a part two.

JOE
Come back and have me do a segment on Catwoman because I have a large collection– I am a Catwoman collector.

MAURICE
That can’t be true.

JOE
Yes it is.

MAURICE
So you know a lot about Catwoman?

JOE
That’s one thing. Well I’ll share with you something–

MAURICE
Halle Berry Catwoman, or?

JOE
All of them.

MAURICE
Right. Every incarnation.

JOE
All of them. And I will tell your public this. When I was younger and I was a young man, we knew there was problems because I wanted to grow up and be Catwoman– not Julie Newmar, not Lee Meriwether, but Eartha Kitt. So I could not be a woman nor could I– well, I could be a woman today but I couldn’t be a black woman.

MAURICE
You could. You really could.

JOE
And that’s who I wanted to be when I was younger. But I probably have the largest collection of Catwoman things. I have almost every comic she’s been in. And so that’s a side note on me. Not only do I like cargo pants, I like Catwoman.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE
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