Zoot Suit

The Zoot Style of Dress

“Zoot” was a slang word common in the 1930s jazz subculture. “Zoot,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, rhymes with “suit,” making zoot a reduplication of suit. Suits were zoot; thus, zoot suit. The suit included a killer diller coat, drape shape, reet pleat, and all that jazz. “Zoot” meant dress or attire in an extravagant style.

There is disagreement about the origin of the suit. One source says the zoot suit was an urban style of poor black men and their tailors in Harlem. Another attributes the zoot suit to Italian Americans and African Americans in Chicago. Zoot suits were worn by blacks, Hispanics, and Italians in the eastern United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Regardless of the source, by the 1940s, poor Mexican American young men adopted the style, as did working-class youth, regardless of skin color. The long coat was sometimes also worn by female gang members. Zoot suiters included César Chávez and Malcolm X, as well as dancers and entertainers.

The coat was long and draped, and the pants were high-waisted, baggy, and oversized, with severely pegged cuffs. Coats had padded shoulders and wide lapels. The coat had to be long, and the pants had to be really full at the knees and tightly pegged at the cuffs. The zoot suit required a conspicuous ducktail hairstyle and a broad-rimmed fat hat or fedora with a large feather in the back. The fedora with a feather in the rim was known as a “tapa.”

Only around 3 percent of Mexican American young men wore zoot suits or belonged to gangs wearing the style, but the media exaggerated, labeling all Mexican Americans as zoot-suited gang members. The 38th Street Gang railroaded in the Sleepy Lagoon case wore zoot suits. By the early [Page 2223]1940s, the zoot suit was the uniform of the defiant, whether rioters or more generalized juvenile delinquents (something else new in the wartime milieu). The American government wanted to stop people from wearing the suits because they appeared to use too much fabric and therefore were unpatriotic and disrespectful in wartime. Made of wool and silk, the tailor-made suits available on the black market defied wool rationing and the ban on silk for purposes other than the war effort.

The zoot suit included high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers. The amount of material and tailoring required to produce them made them a luxury item during war years.

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