Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2012 May 31

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May 31

Zoot suits

Kind of a dumb question but: I just read an article on the pachucos of Los Angeles during the 1940's, and was fascinated to learn exactly what the zoot suit riots were. It said that LA passed a law banning the suits. Has this law been overturned, so that anyone crazy (or retro) enough to wear a zoot suit in LA will not be arrested, or what? 75.73.226.36 (talk) 11:14, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

According to our Zoot Suit Riots article, there was a resolution passed by the city council, but "no ordinance was ever approved by the City Council or signed into law by the Mayor". --LarryMac | Talk 11:42, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

They were never outlawed. It's probable that they went into a contemporaneous decline when the USA entered WWII due to rationing of woolen cloth, and were seen as old fashioned after the war, though that's not mentioned in the zoot suit article. In the 1980s, Kid Creole's (of Kid Creole and the Coconuts) signature outfit was a zoot suit, and probably still is. There are plenty of online stores where you can buy them today.--Shirt58 (talk) 11:48, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

They were looked at much as we would look at clothing or tattoos signifying gang membership today. Probably with less justification, though I would not say with no justification.--Wehwalt (talk) 13:38, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

I wonder which street gang Evil-Eye Fleegle belonged to. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:41, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

It seems to be a better comparison would be something like a hoodie (although a zoot suit doesn't seem to have the advantage of possibly obscuring identity). I don't see much evidence from reading the relevent articles most people wearing zoot suits would be gang members, it sounds like they were popular in a certain culture which contained many non gang members. By comparison, you don't generally want to have a gang tattoo if you're not a member of a gang, so it's rare among people who aren't either present or former members of a gang. Of course some people may mistake other tattoos for gang tattoos. Both are similar with clothing, in some cases to the extreme it's alleged wearing the wrong colour in the wrong neighbourhood can get you shot. Nil Einne (talk) 02:36, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

I've just been reading Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People 1939–1945 by Geoffrey Perrett (Coward-McCann, 1973; Penguin Books, Baltimore 1974: ISBN 0-14-00-3787-X). In a discussion of the rise of juvenile delinquency during World War II and its aggravation into the threat and employment of deadly force (on page 349 of the Penguin edition), he writes

Zoot suits had meanwhile gone from being the fad of harmless jitterbuggers to being the uniform of young thugs organized in street gangs. Youth dances frequently ended up as free-for-alls. To the standard zoot suit accessories there had been added an ornate switchblade knife for boys and a whiskey flask shaped to fit inside a brassiere for girls.

Unfortunately for us, since he was writing a semi-popular history for the general reader, the references are in the back and give no specific citation for this kind of detail (or synthesis of his own reading). This comes after his discussion of the zoot suit riots and other race riots of 1943, but since the book is partly arranged by topic as well as time, and since such a development would itself no doubt be gradual, it may not respond very directly to the original question. —— Shakescene (talk) 05:27, 5 June 2012 (UTC)