J. Clarke articles

Hip hop didn’t politely ask the fashion world for permission—it showed up dressed better than everyone else and dared the industry to keep up. From street corners to couture runways, rappers turned personal style into cultural authority, reshaping how luxury, rebellion, and identity look on a global stage. Below are 22 unmistakable looks that helped crown hip hop as the most powerful force in style.

There’s a reason hip hop heads still argue about the 1990s like it’s a religious doctrine. This was the decade when lyricism mattered, regional sounds thrived without canceling each other out, and artists weren’t afraid to be funny, political, vulnerable, or confrontational—sometimes all in the same verse.

Curtis Mayfield had already lived several musical lifetimes by the time fate intervened. He’d helped invent socially conscious soul, soundtracked the civil rights movement, and quietly influenced generations of artists who followed. Then, in 1990, a falling stage light changed everything. What came next wasn’t a dramatic comeback or a victory lap—it was a slow, stubborn refusal to stop creating. This is how Curtis Mayfield kept making music when almost nothing worked the way it used to.

Before theme songs became skip buttons and recaps started explaining things you absolutely already knew, TV shows had one precious chance to grab your attention. Enter the cold open—the pre-credits moment designed to hook you, delight you, or completely derail your expectations before the story even begins. Let’s journey through some of the most iconic cold opens in TV history.

American remakes of British TV have a reputation—and not always a flattering one. For every awkward cultural transplant, there’s a reinvention that somehow clicks harder, lasts longer, and embeds itself into pop culture in a way the original never quite managed. Sometimes it’s a cast change, sometimes it’s pacing, and sometimes it’s just the confidence to go bigger, louder, and messier.

Hollywood loves a test screening. Dim the lights, hand out comment cards, and let a roomful of strangers decide a movie’s fate. Sometimes that feedback saves a project. Other times, it nearly buries films that would later be crowned untouchable classics. From endings that were completely rewritten to tones that were wildly misunderstood, these movies all faced brutal early reactions—and survived anyway.

Every superstar origin story has a before and after moment—and usually, it’s marked by a single song. Before the hit, they were grinding, hustling, and hoping someone would listen. After it, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. These songs didn’t just chart well; they reframed careers overnight, turning unknown names into unavoidable ones.

Hollywood loves control—marks on the floor, lines rehearsed to a T, emotions calibrated to the exact second. So when a filmmaker tosses all that out and lets real people wander into the frame, it feels like a gamble bordering on chaos. But sometimes that chaos is exactly what gives a movie its pulse.

TV shows ask us to invest years of our lives in fictional people. We watch them grow, fail, fall in love, make unforgivable mistakes, and sometimes become better versions of themselves. So when a character leaves before a series ends, it can feel like a breakup—one that either gives you emotional closure or leaves you staring at the screen wondering what just happened.