Just as Philippine menswear adopted the amerikana through colonization, Filipinos abroad had a hand in influencing the one suit that is considered to be “authentically American”: the zoot suit, characterized by its oversized coats with wide lapels, broad shoulders, and a cinched waist, and high-waisted trousers with pegged cuffs.
“No one really knows for sure where the suit came from,” begins Clarissa M. Esguerra, fashion historian and curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). “There are stories about a tailor from Pittsburgh, a tailor in Georgia, everywhere. One of the stories is that Filipinos came up with the style because they’re smaller.” She smiles, “I mean, who knows? That could just be somebody’s story, but that is one of them.”
The zoot suit would emerge as a trend in New York City, worn on the backs of the Black musicians, artists, and poets who made the Harlem Renaissance, and in Southern California, among Black and first-generation American men, particularly those of Mexican, Filipino, and Japanese descent. The people who wore them were “young, disenfranchised men who needed community and a way to express themselves where they felt proud and good,” Esguerra explains. “And so, they would adapt the suit to be seen.”
Their “drapes,” as they referred to them, were either bespoke or semi-custom to specification. At the time, Americans wore suits inspired by those from London and Milan, which were tighter and slimmer. By the 1930s, menswear had come to be characterized by the natural body, or a softer, draped silhouette that originated on Savile Row; the zoot suit was built upon that base, then “exploded” to exaggerated proportions.
In an opinion piece she wrote for Vestoj, Esguerra explains that the suit was a style that these men often had to work towards. “Although these semi-custom suits were more affordable than custom tailoring, the cost was still expensive for most working-class youths,” she writes. “The sheer extravagance in the draped shape of this suit suggests that it may have…[been] worn for performance, as the wearer would have generated such movement and presence in the pegged ensemble.”
“One of the stories is that Filipinos came up with the style because they’re smaller. I mean, who knows?”
The suggestion of performance was a defiant act. For many white Americans, the zoot suit was “a symbol of subversion, especially as racial tensions continued to rise,” at the height of Jim Crow. When wartime restrictions made the use of textiles in excess illegal, Esguerra tells Vogue Philippines, by wearing a zoot suit, “you were doing something that was ‘unpatriotic.’ But these kids, they’re like, ‘What do I need to be patriotic about, for this country that has done nothing for me?’”
Animosity was a price these young men paid, if only to look and feel their best. “The zoot suit came to symbolize a place that was theirs, that was for them,” Esguerra says. “It was a style that they developed. It was worn for a place they frequented and were welcome to be part of. It was worn as a celebration of themselves.”
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