In the 1980s, Daniel Day, better known as Dapper Dan, made a name for himself selling leather jackets and tracksuits emblazoned with bootleg Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Fendi logos. His Harlem boutique drew gangsters, athletes and hip-hop stars, from Mike Tyson to Salt-N-Pepa — until it was raided for trademark infringement in 1992.
Now, 27 years later, the same luxe labels who sought to shut him down are copying him. Dapper Dan’s influence is everywhere, from Balenciaga’s oversize fur-lined leather coats to Louis Vuitton’s flashy “LV” belt buckles.
Day traces his evolution from fashion outlaw to oracle in a candid new memoir, “Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem,” (Penguin Random House) out Tuesday.
Born in 1944 in an East Harlem tenement, Day writes that his family was “poor as hell.” His father worked three jobs to support Day and his six siblings, and Day was “always hungry,” with sore feet from walking around with holes in his shoes.
When he was 13, Day began playing dice, racking up thousands of dollars a day from outsmarting flush drug dealers. (He earned the nickname Dapper Dan from a stylish elder gambler.) By the time he entered high school, Day’s older brothers were already deep in heroin, and Day got into drugs, too. He was arrested in his early 20s for dealing, and, after getting clean, continued to “hustle,” playing craps and dabbling in credit-card fraud.
Then, a 1974 trip to Africa — to see the famed Muhammad Ali-George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” match — changed his life. In Liberia, he went to a tailor to have a suit made from scratch.
“I’d never met a black person who could do what [he] did,” Day writes. Harlem had only had one custom shop, and it had closed years ago. “I began to think, ‘Someone could fill that void.’ ”
He opened Dapper Dan’s 125th Street boutique in 1982, initially selling furs to the lords of the underworld. He started creating clothes covered in luxe logos after seeing the commotion a drug dealer’s girlfriend and her Louis Vuitton clutch caused. His first prototype was a jacket trimmed with branded Gucci garment bags. After a client wore it to a party, everyone wanted one.
“I went back down to the Gucci store and bought every single canvas print garment bag they had in stock,” Day writes. “We was buying so many, they didn’t know what was going on.”
Eventually, inspired by Andy Warhol, Dap taught himself to silk-screen, so he could print cotton and leather with Louis Vuitton, Gucci and MCM patterns. He used the fabrics to make over-the-top pants and mink-lined jackets that sold for thousands of dollars.
Running a 24-hour shop catering to drug kingpins, professional boxers and rappers could get rowdy. Russell Simmons “would come into the shop stoned on angel dust and just be ogling my female employees,” he writes in the book. Day witnessed a drug dealer being kidnapped right in his store; Day was later shot in the back and almost died while sitting in his Mercedes across the street. In 1988, the shop made national headlines when Mike Tyson beat fellow boxer Mitch Green right outside of it. The incident attracted attention, leading authorities to investigate the store, with its pricey jackets and high-profile clientele. Dapper Dan withstood several raids, before the fatal one in 1992, spearheaded by future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that forced him to close his shop.
But that didn’t keep him out of fashion. After a few months trying to sell knockoff Chanel T-shirts on the street, Day shored up enough money from gambling to relaunch in the late 1990s a smaller-scale version of Dapper Dan’s out of the brownstone he shared with his wife and their two kids.
Now, the slender, tall, dapper Day is more comfortable snagging the spotlight. When Gucci was criticized for ripping off one of Day’s bombastic designs in 2017, the Italian label set Day up with his own Dapper Dan x Gucci atelier in Harlem, which opened last year. Once shunned by the industry, he recently attended the Met Gala, and is often called upon to comment on fashion’s problems with race and diversity — finally getting the credit he deserves.
“I took these brands and pushed them into new territory,” he writes of his legacy. “I knocked them up, I didn’t knock them off.”
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