I had never heard of Dapper Dan before, but what a legend before his time. He grew up in Harlem with the kind of life I really don't know about, around crime, violence, gangsters, mobs, and drug leaders. His struggles were/are real for many black Americans growing up in poverty and low income areas. But he made the best of it.

While many of us would see his life as illegal, it was how he had to survive. From love of writing, to the throw of dice, to early credit card fraud, to the creation of clothing. He made a life for him self and his family.

The clothes people wear today and what we call fashion have several influences; and Dapper Dan, is among those visionaries who created fashion. He had a brilliant and creative mind and refused to go work for a large corporation as their designer, but chose to not be stifled by society and create on his own.

Memoirs are one of my favorite genres and I absolutely loved this one!! Heartbreaking at times and funny at others. I love learning the backgrounds of other people/celebrities and this definitely fueled my hunger for learning. I did not know who Dapper Dan was before this, but I love everything he stands for and represents. Definitely recommend.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes

Wow. So it's funny that I now know who made the clothes that the rappers that I grew up watching (Big Daddy Kane) on tv wore. I never heard of Dapper Dan before, but I found myself engrossed in his story as he recounts how his family left the south (Great Migration) and them settling into Harlem. We follow Dan as he starts playing dice and using that to make money. From there we follow him as he gets caught up in the drug world, going to jail, becoming addicted, and follows how Dan turns his life around and starts making clothes that will eventually have drug kingpins and rappers at his shop day and night in the late 80s and early 90s.

Dan Day has a beauty with words. You can tell that this book was researched. Besides providing us with personal anecdotes, we also get some history while reading. I have read about the The Great Migration or the Black Migration that occurred between the early 1900s and late 1970s with African Americans moving out of the South up North and parts of the Midwest. However, reading about how Dan's father and mother both moved up to New York and found themselves struggling there made it more real to me than just reading about it in a history book.

Day shows you that for many African Americans, the decks were stacked high against them to even have enough food to put on the plates for their children. Many of the boys Day's age end up dropping out of high school and going to work selling and taking drugs.

Day's fall into drugs, him seeing what it does to two of his brothers, eventually has him kicking the habit (after a stay in jail) and him embracing the tents of the Nation of Islam. He ends up not following them or the Black Panthers though due to some of the violent rhetoric they get into about drug dealers. However, he still exercises and stops eating meat. When Day travels to Africa, he eventually finds himself a tailor that makes him clothes that has all of the men in Harlem wanting to know where did he get that look. From there Day is able to start his own empire providing clothes to rappers, athletes (like Mike Tyson) and even meets a future Supreme Court Justice.

When the book goes into Day's next downfall (dealing with Gucci and Fendi suing him for taking their trademark/luggage and working them into clothes) you wonder how is going to recover from this.

I thought this book was raw and honest. Day doesn't blink from the things he did and offers no apologies except when mentioning how he had multiple children and wishes he had been there more for them. Day's insights into people like Don King, Mike Tyson, and even Muhammad Ali just made the book feel like you get a front page seat watching history as it unfolds. I still don't get dice (yeah I have tried to follow that even when I was a girl) and it seems as if Day has the magic touch for dice. Him realizing that he is not going to be able to feed and clothe his family if he can't figure out another way to provide for them and his flair for designing clothes was great.

I loved that the book included some pictures of Day's family growing up. Since this was an ARC there wasn't a description on the photos, but I still enjoyed seeing them. I do wish that we had gotten some pictures of the singers and rappers he mentions wearing his designs. I think that would have made the book pop even more.

The ending leaves things with a big question about what the future held for Day. I got nosy and found out that he ended up in a partnership with Gucci last year in a new Harlem atelier, a space for him to work his sartorial magic with a free hand and raw materials supplied by Gucci, see https://www.gq.com/story/dapper-dan-gucci-harlem-atelier-exclusive-interview

This book was received as an ARC from Random House in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

A lot of the artists Dapper Dan used to style for I am very familiar with but I am not familiar with Dapper Dan himself hence the reason I wanted to preview this book. Our big fifth grade project was to do a biography and this name was thrown out there as one of the celebrities that was picked by one of our fifth graders and he was disappointed because there were not enough books on him. We are so happy now we can tell him that his auto biography will be released soon. While reading the biography it was interesting to see the upbringing of Dapper Dan and how he came to be.

We will consider adding this title to our biography collection at the library. That is why we give this book 4 stars.

Thank you NetHallet for the ARC on Dapper Dan: Made In Harlem.
I thoroughly enjoyed Mr.Dapper Dan. The novel is a Memoir. A well written one at that.
The description of the novel :
The story of a legendary designer who pioneered high-end streetwear, from a storefront in Harlem to the red carpet in Hollywood, dressing everyone from Salt-N-Pepa and Eric B. & Rakim to Beyoncé and JAY Z along the way.
With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the early 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own flamboyant designs. But before reinventing fashion, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books, and, finally, a designer who broke barriers to outfit a whos-who of music, sport, and crime world celebrities in looks that went on to define an era.

By turns playful, poignant, and inspiring, and featuring two incredible eight-page color photo inserts, including the only existing, never-before-seen images of the notorious Mike Tyson-Mitch Green street fight, Dapper Dan's memoir is a high-stakes coming-of-age story, spanning more than seventy years and set against the backdrop of an ever-evolving America.
Now, we know through smiles, photos and his words why everyone is so Dapper. A brilliant man started with nothing but the need and Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem changed average Joe into High end dressed and styled.