Where do the pimps shop for gear in your hood?
Big_Chan
5,088 Posts
Downtown Seattle has Leroy Men's Wear! This place is the most pimped out hood clothing store evar!!!! LOL. Check out their commercial below. Please to post stories, commercials and pictures from the pimp stores in your hood.
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Who's Taylor?
Swift Fool.....
I was waiting to see supreme's cameo in this add. bi ol piiiyyymp.
Seriously though, WTF? How can they afford to stay in business unless these are sold as Halloween costumes.
LOL, this was one of the related clips on youtube:
Classic Chitown store, no longer around, but this 1980 commercial is worth seeing.
LOL! That was crazy.
Supreme and some fly ladies are in the uncut version.
It was a real chain of stores in this area and Vic Reeves is from around here, anyone of a "certain" age (myself included) had at least one pair of Geordie Jeans...
The owner was this small 40 year old dude, that dressed exactly like in the video at the top.
He walked with a cane, long hair in a pony tail, and facial hair. Always rocking one of those rounded hats with the turn up brim.
The store was decked out in dark wood and crushed velvet. Glass cases etc. Sure it cost a fortune, but I only went there once.
Wow! Sounds great! Do you have any pictures of the owner and the shop?
My mom used to always wonder how it stayed in business, seemed so out of place on the West Side at that time.
One time coming home from school, mad people gathered out front, taking pictures through the glass. Mike Tyson was in there, buying a grip of suits.
It's changed a lot over the years, but it's still a clothing spot. I think they sell wack sneakers there now.
Nah I wish I did, and I don't remember what the shop is called. I know exactly where it was in Shibuya so I might be able to find something if I look online.
I have a feeling its not a one of a kind shop in Japan, but that a scene for it exists. It was a bit surreal though.
In any event, I like to imagine pickwick hitting up Roberto's (a spot, by the way, that routinely tops lists of Chicago's Ugliest Buildings; until recently, the upper floor of their exterior had a massive color portrait of Roberto himself that the sun had roasted and peeled into straight ghoulishness, making it look kinda like a cross between a fallen Eddie Kane and one of those Visible Man kits) for a shirt, but getting upsold into a short set and some gators and walking out with a look of how-did-I-get-here? bewilderment.
There used to be a place out by here called Sophisticated Themes where steppers (and presumably pimps) got 'fitted, but I think it got replaced by some weird evangelical hair spot.
I may have talked about this previously, but a while back I saw on public-access tv a show consisting of a lengthy interview/conversation between the show's host and the proprietor of one of Chicago's bigger Leroy's-type operations, the name of which regrettably escapes me. I recognized the host as a dude who usually discusses numerology and colonics and sometimes appears on-air in only a loincloth and a turban, but for this occasion he was rocking a glowing white button up, a very involved brocade vest, and a fez whose admitted stylishness did not entirely mitigate the fact that it was like two feet tall. Towering as it was, though, I won't front: dude was wearing it. His guest, the owner dude, was lounging imperially in some undoubtedly top-of-the-line zoot, and was going on endlessly about how his shop was pushing the boundaries, not like the rest of these crumbs, and was the only place truly putting Chicago menswear on the world stage. "You have to understand: You have a lot of these places with their Super 700s, their Super 800s, but my shop is the only place in Chicago--the only place, brother--and one of very few in the country, even, where a man can get...[wait for it]...Super 5000s. That's right: a five-thousand thread count, brother..." Just ridiculous, over-the-top, vainglorious shit. After that went on for a while, he started trotting out dudes modelling his various marquee pieces, one of which had been designed by--and was being modelled by--this Wish Bone-looking guy named Boo-Boo. "And again, you have to understand: You see a lot of shops making suits that have, for example, seven groups of double buttons, maybe even five groups of triple buttons, but you will notice that this suit here has...[wait for it]...six groups of quadruple buttons. But you see, that's how we do it at my shop. That's...that's...[rolling his hands in the air in front of him, trying to conjure the right word for this kind of genius, finally exhaling and giving up]...Well, that's just Boo-Boo being Boo-Boo." And during the entire interview, at the bottom of the screen they kept flashing the words "THE GREAT MEETING OF THE MINDS HAS OCCURRED." Shit was like two hours long and I couldn't look away, not once.
Chicago's apparently got some shit. My man who knows about this kind of thing says that the only city that can hang with Chicago as far as this kind of gentleman's dressing is Atlanta. He says that Detroit used to could, but that they've fallen off a little, and now the only thing they're really excelling at is hair and shoes. I can neither confirm nor deny, though, as I stay busted, and thus have no horse in this race. I'm just telling you what he told me.
Nah, I'm FAIRLY tight with a dollar; nobody's gonna upsell me unless I was intending to buy it in the first place. But, they WILL get up in your grill trying to persuade you to buy this, that & the other thing...
You're pretty close to 47th St....IIRC, the shopping district around the el tracks were loaded down with these kind of pimpwear shops...
You know that modest park on State Street by the el tracks? Across the street from Harold Washington Library? If I'm not mistaken, in the sixties and seventies Smokey Joe's was located on that spot. They used to advertise on local black radio, as well as on Channel 2 at 2 AM during The Late Late Show. All the pimps used the shop there, and if you talk to any of the local soul groups of the time, they always used to get their matching suits there.
Even an early version of the band who became Chicago used to shop at that place. There's a story about how they were working some suburban bar gig. The owner walks up to one of the members and asks them to play a "belly-rubber" (slow song). So they then do "How Could I Be Such A Fool," by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention. One member asks the others to start tearing off his Smokey Joe's suit one by one. Before they got to his draws, the band was fired on the spot. The next weekend, they got high, went to see Cream live, and pretty soon they changed their format and stopped wearing chitlin'-circuit suits on stage...
They were still going strong up until the mid-eighties, when downtown Chicago's reconstruction campaign slowly got rid of the funkier elements. But they had a good run there for years.