Jay-Z, Travis Scott or Kendrick Lamar. If these three musicians have something in common, beyond the fact that they sing hip-hop, it is their way of dressing. Sports clothing, wide and with a very visible luxury symbology. A street style that they owe to Dapper Dan, a mythical figure from Harlem who was in charge of dressing the first generation of hip hop artists. The journalist David Broc and the editor of Superflua Martín Torres spoke this Thursday at the Bernat bookstore about the memories of this tailor, who rose to fame in the eighties but who had already made a name for himself in the New York neighborhood for dressing drug traffickers and black athletes.
“Dapper Dan was a hustler. He did whatever it took to survive and he was a first-class con artist. He learned to duplicate cards and also stole clothes to sell. With the money that those businesses gave him, plus what he got by playing dice, his great hobby, he ended up opening a store in Harlem, which became a point of reference,” Torres explained.
It was a trip to Africa that made Dapper understand the importance of dressing well and how the world sees you. “Almost everything he made was custom, personalized clothing. One day, a girl came into his store with a Louis Vuitton bag, and then he noticed the looks and enthusiasm of the people. He understood the importance of logos and started sewing them on her clothes. He created a trend, until the big brands discovered him and closed shop. But he had already paved the way. Now, it is these firms who are going to look for him and not the other way around, since he has just collaborated with Gucci and Gap,” said the editor.
In that same United States lived John Fante, considered one of the great cursed writers of the 20th century until Bukowski rescued him, ensuring that, for him, “he was like a God.” A genius who saw the reward of his talent frustrated in life but whose prose “marked subsequent literature,” as the translator Josep Grau pointed out to the writer Lluís Oliván during a conversation about the author at the Ona bookstore, regarding the translation. into Catalan of the title Un mal any (Edicions 1984).
The book, which is a clear reflection of social inequalities in the United States, tells the life of Dominic Molise, an Italian-American teenager who believes he is destined to succeed as a baseball player. “His father, on the other hand, wants him to follow the family tradition and be a pope, but the protagonist struggles to shake off that weight of the land from which he comes.” A story that has just arrived in bookstores and that “has been possible thanks to the pandemic. I was in an ERTE and I had this book in English at home and I took the opportunity to read it. I found it so interesting that I thought I could try to translate it,” Grau confessed to the attendees.
“In my daily life and in my work, I speak English, but it is not the same as translating. So I bought manuals and trained. I started to pay a lot of attention to the translations of the films. You could say that I became obsessed, but this helped me move forward. Every chapter that finished, I passed it on to Lluís, to see what he thought, since he has read a large part of Fante’s work.
On the same continent, but decades later and in another city, in Posadas, a baby and a collection of poems were born, The Years in Front of the Bridge (La Bella Varsovia), by Andrés Barba. The pandemic forced the Madrid writer to make a 180-degree turn and leave New York behind, to “flight” to Buenos Aires and, later, move to the provincial capital of Misiones, on the border with Paraguay.
“It was going to be temporary, but we continue to live there, in front of a bridge, which makes me feel like we are absorbed by a symbol and an archetype. A permanent commercial transit develops there, which is referred to in some of the poems in this book,” reflected the author in the Finestres bookstore together with the writer Xita Rubert and Alberto Pina, co-editor and creator of the artist’s book publishing house El Garibaldi canyon.
It refers to the Roque González bridge, which connects the cities of Posadas and Encarnación, and which “serves as a metaphor, but is essentially a collective object carried by the gaze.” Barba tells his readers that this book is a river into which various themes flow, such as fatherhood, “something I never thought I would write about,” the sense of borders or the role of history in everyday life.
