Excerpts From Various Online Articles Describing Zoot Suits (with A 1944 Film Clip Of Jazz Singer Cab Calloway Wearing A Zoot Suit)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post is part of an ongoing series on the fashion attire known as "zoot suits".

This post showcases a 1944 film clip of Jazz band leader/singer Cab Calloway wearing a zoot suit.

This post also provides excerpts from five online articles that describe zoot suits.

The Addendum to this post showcases a 1944 Tom & Jerry cartoon entitled "The Zoot Cat".

The content of this post is presented for cultural, educational, entertainment, and aesthetic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post. Thanks also to Cab Calloway and his band for their musical legacy and thanks to the publishers of these two embedded YouTube videos.
-snip-
Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2014/02/two-examples-of-1942-song-zoot-suit-for.html for a 2014 pancocojams post entitled "Two Examples Of The 1942 Song "Zoot Suit (For My Sunday Gal).

****
SHOWCASE VIDEO: Cab Calloway & his Band - Geechy Joe - Stormy Weather (1943)



Bessjazz, Published on Apr 21, 2010

http://www.bojazz.com/ http://bjazz.unblog.fr/
Cab Calloway & his Band - Geechy Joe (Cab Calloway, Jack Palmer & Andy Gibson), with Lena Horne, dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, drummer Zutty Singleton, bassist Slam Stewart, Trumpeter Benny Carter...
in "Stormy Weather" (1943) by Andrew L. Stone, for Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Song: Geechie Joe (from the film Stormy Weather)
Artist: Cab Calloway
Album: The Hi-De-Ho Man
-snip-
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah
“The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia and South Carolina, in both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. They developed a creole language, the Gullah language, and a culture rich in African influences that makes them distinctive among African Americans.

Historically, the Gullah region extended from the Cape Fear area on North Carolina's coast south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on Florida's coast. Today, the Gullah area is confined to the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry. The Gullah people and their language are also called Geechee, which may be derived from the name of the Ogeechee River near Savannah, Georgia."...

****
EXCERPTS DESCRIBING ZOOT SUITS
These excerpts are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.

EXCERPT #1
"A zoot suit (occasionally spelled zuit suit[1]) is a men's suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing became especially popular among the Latino, African American, Italian American, and Filipino American communities during the 1940s.[2][3]

Some observers claim that the "Edwardian-look" suits with velvet lapels worn by Teddy Boys in Britain are said to be a derivative of the zoot suit.[4]

Zoot suits were first associated with African Americans in urban communities such as Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit, but were made popular by jazz musicians in the 1940s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "zoot" probably comes from a reduplication of suit. The creation and naming of the zoot suit have been variously attributed to Harold C. Fox, a Chicago clothier and big-band trumpeter;[5] Charles Klein and Vito Bagnato of New York City;[6] Louis Lettes, a Memphis tailor;[7] and Nathan (Toddy) Elkus, a Detroit retailer.[8][9]

"A Zoot Suit (For My Sunday Gal)" was a 1942 song written by L. Wolfe Gilbert and Bob O'Brien.[10]

Cab Calloway frequently wore zoot suits on stage and in the 1943 film Stormy Weather, including some with exaggerated details, such as extremely wide shoulders or overly draped jackets.

In 1943 during World War II there were a series of anti-Mexican youth riots in Los Angeles known as the Zoot Suit Riots. Norris J. Nelson, Los Angeles City Council member, proposed outlawing zoot suits after the Riots.The suits worn by many of the youth were seen by some as unpatriotic because of the amount of fabric they used, and in time, zoot suits were prohibited for the duration of the war,[11] ostensibly because of their wastefulness of cloth.[12]

Pachuco was a style of Mexican-American dress and culture, is which was associated with the zoot suit."...

****
EXCERPT #2
From http://cdispatch.com/robhardy/article.asp?aid=15572 "Drape Shape and Reet Pleats" by Rob Hardy, February 9, 2012
....“There is much that is not known about the zoot suit, such as the true story of its origins. Different tailors or performers have been credited with being the inventor of the zoot suit, but it cannot be attributed to any one source. It did have antecedents. Voluminous pants were called "Oxford Bags" and had been a British University fad in the 1920s. The "English drape" style of jacket became popular in the 1930s, with wide shoulders and roomy armholes. Clark Gable's long frock coat with loosely draped trousers in Gone with the Wind may have played a role; Cab Calloway himself punned that sharp dressers "were so impressed with Gable's long coat that they just 'followed suit.'" One story of the outfit's origins is that a Beale Street tailor in Memphis lengthened the coat so as to hide the shine in the seat of the pants. Custom tailors were always ready to make suits with measurements to order, and when the style was eventually settled upon, ready-to-wear versions were available at department stores.

The design of the suit had many modifications, and came in all colors, but it consisted basically of "the long killer-diller coat with a drape shape and wide shoulders; pants with reet-pleats, billowing out at the knees, tightly tapered and pegged at the ankles; a porkpie or wide-brimmed hat; pointed or thick-soled shoes; and a long, dangling keychain." It took the idea of a suit and stretched it almost to caricature. In one way it was a practical garment. A regular suit during the forties would have been too confining for the gymnastic movies of swing and jitterbug. The zoot suit's roomy pants accentuated leg movement, and pegging them at the ankles meant that they didn't get tangled with the clothes of other dancers."...

****
EXCERPT #3
From https://people.howstuffworks.com/zoot-suit1.htm "How Zoot Suits Work"
BY CHRIS WARREN
"History of Zoot Suits

[...]

Although a number of tailors around the country claimed to be the first designers of the suit, no credible evidence points to a single individual being responsible for the look. According to Kathy Peiss, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style," zoot suits were an exaggerated version of what was known as a drape suit -- zoot suits were called "extreme drapes," in fact, and were advertised as such in African-American newspapers at the time.

Made initially out of wool -- and later rayon, as rationing for World War II kicked in -- zoot suits had a number of defining characteristics. Suit pants were worn high on the waist and very tight; below the waist, the pants billowed like parachutes around the thighs and knees before being tied tight at the ankles. Zoot suit jackets also had exaggerated contours, with wide shoulders and sleeves that reached the wearer's fingertips [source: Unger]. Many zoot suiters also donned hats adorned with feathers, wore pointy shoes and sported key chains that dropped all the way to the knees to complete the look."...

****
EXCERPT #4
From https://www.thoughtco.com/zoot-suit-history-4147678
"A Cultural History of the Zoot Suit" by Bob Strauss, Updated August 07, 2017
"In the 1944 Tom & Jerry short "The Zoot Cat"—only the thirteenth cartoon ever made starring that famous duo—Tom's would-be girlfriend lays it on him straight: "Boy, are you corny! You act like a square at the fair, a goon from Saskatoon. You come on like a broken arm. You're a sad apple, a long hair, a cornhusker. In other words, you don't send me!" The sad cat goes out and buys himself some new duds from Smiling Sam, the Zoot Suit Man, prompting his wide-eyed gal pal to do a one-eighty.

"You're really a sharp character! A mellow little fellow. Now you collar my jive!"

Around the same time on the American scene—but, culturally speaking, light-years away—a young Malcom X, then known as "Detroit Red," also sang the praises of the Zoot Suit, a "killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet-pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic's cell." (Apparently, people in the 1940's liked to rhyme more than they do today.) In his widely read autobiography, Malcolm X describes his first Zoot Suit almost in religious terms: "Sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee and angle narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees...hat angled, knees drawn close together, feet wide apart, both index fingers jabbed toward the floor." (We won't even mention Cesar Chavez, the famous Mexican-American labor activist who wore Zoot Suits as a teen.)

What was it about Zoot Suits that united such disparate cultural icons as Malcom X, Cesar Chavez, and Tom & Jerry? The origins of the Zoot Suit, characterized by its wide lapels, padded shoulders, and baggy pants tapering down to narrow cuffs--and usually accessorized with a feathered hat and a dangling pocket watch—are shrouded in mystery, but the style seems to have coalesced in Harlem nightclubs in the mid-1930's, and then worked its way out into the wider urban culture."...

****
EXCERPT #5 [Added October 8, 208]
From https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2011-04-07/research/zoot-suit-all-american-fashion-changed-history "The zoot suit: an all-American fashion that changed history" published on Penntoday on April 7, 2011
"With jacket arms that reached the fingertips and pants worn tight at the waist, bulging at the knees and choked at the ankles, it was nearly impossible to ignore a man wearing a zoot suit.
Accessorized with a key chain that extended to the knees and a fedora-like hat with a feather attached, the fashion certainly said something about those who sported it. But what statement were those who were donning the look in the late 1930s and early 1940s trying to make?

That’s one of questions Kathy Peiss explores in her new book, “Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style.” In the book, Peiss, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, examines the fashion phenomenon that became so politically polarizing it played a part in sparking a vicious uprising in California, known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

“I argue that people [wore] it for a whole range of reasons,” she says. “It had many different meanings, including the pleasure of looking sharp and being part of a group of young people in the war years. The zoot suit should not be looked at solely as a costume that conveys political resistance.”

Peiss traces the creation of the zoot suit to Harlem in the mid to late 1930s, when tailors began making them out of wool or colorful varieties of rayon. Although its exact origin is unknown, the term “zoot suit” appears to have come from the rhyming slang, or jive, spoken in the African-American community at the time, Peiss says.

“They were generally worn by young men of African-American descent, initially,” Peiss says. “Mexican-American and white working-class men also would wear them. Typically they would buy them at local clothing shops and have them tailored to this oversized style.”

The suit’s rise in popularity coincided with the emergence of the jitterbug and other forms of swing dance music. The flowing look of the suit was particularly flashy on the dance floor, and young people took note. Their parents, however, were not quite as smitten by the style."...

****
ADDENDUM: Tom And Jerry Cartoon The Zoot Cat



Joshua D. Jennings, Published on Jan 7, 2017

****
Thanks for visiting pancocojams.

Visitor comments are welcome.