Though MC Lyte and other women rappers of her generation wore streetwear that was almost unisex in fashion, the addition of large earrings, neatly pressed or crimped hair (often dyed a bold shade of auburn), and pastel colors to their sartorial repertoire marked a striving towards a specific expression of womanhood in hip-hop. She expressed her authority in both her seminal single “Paper Thin”-about a philandering boyfriend-and her style in the music video-tracksuit, varsity jacket, sneakers, and turtleneck, with doorknocker earrings swinging as she confronts said boyfriend on the New York subway with his arms around big haired, acrylic wearing women. MC Lyte (aka Lana Michele Moorer) is considered a pioneer in women in hip-hop. The earliest women in hip-hop adopted the swagger and baggy clothes of their male counterparts, not only for protection from harm but to establish their equality on the mic. Because of these harmful stereotypes, women had double the struggle to assert their voices into the conversation and earn respect. The abandonment of cities to housing projects inhabited by African Americans-known as “white flight”-and the crack-cocaine epidemic of America’s inner cities were the backdrop against which hip-hop artists detailed the divestment, crime, and oppression of city life. By the 1980s, these stereotypes and assumptions developed in continued harmful ways, sparked by the Moynihan Report, a government publication released in 1965 that placed the ills of the African American community on its women.

Black women have historically contended with stereotypes and assumptions about their womanhood and sexuality.

80s hip hop fashion female