“Fresh Dressed”

When I began reviewing movies online by watching a documentary every day, I strongly believed that every doc, even not-too-great ones, still had intrinsic, significant worth. “Even if it didn’t move me too much,” I thought, “at least I learned something new.” And many people process nonfiction film the same way, with a utilitarian mindset. But movies aren’t tools — they’re art. Even if boring art can be useful or educational, it’s still boring.

Thus, the more time passes, the less I give films like Fresh Dressed any sort of pass. Where once I saw every documentary focused on a particular topic as an opportunity to learn, now I find many to be missed opportunities to really get at what various subcultures mean to their practitioners. Like the rest of its ilk, Fresh Dressed tries to do this, but it has its interviewees outright state how they feel about the subject at hand: hip-hop fashion. It’s completely graceless, and few viewers would tolerate it in a fiction film. Such sound bites are brushed aside quickly, anyway, lost in the flurry to ensure the doc covers all the historical beats it needs to. The story is little more than a visualized CliffsNotes of a Wikipedia article.

Director Sacha Jenkins, a veteran music journalist, obviously knows his subject well. And he’s assembled an intriguing roster of talking heads. Musicians like Sean Combs, Nas, and Pharrell Williams join moguls like Karl Kani, Damon Dash, and Daymond John to explain how hip-hop fashion evolved from part of a subculture to a multi-billion-dollar industry. It went hand in hand with the rise of hip-hop itself. All this information comes courtesy of the expected documentary conventions. I almost feel like I should make a template for describing the style, to match how many movies follow it to the letter. Interviews. File footage. Ken-Burns-affected photographs. Animated recreations of events. Clips from pop culture. One checklist item after another getting marked off. It’s enervating to watch.

It’s hard to imagine that Fresh Dressed holds any appeal for people who already have an interest in its topic, since they’re likely to already know everything the film has to tell them. They’re more likely to be offended by anything the doc leaves out that they consider important (for instance, it noticeably focuses exclusively on menswear, and few women contribute to the discussion). It does seem to be slanted more as a primer for those not in the know — whenever someone uses a term specific to the subculture, a dictionary definition “helpfully” appears onscreen. It’s actually vaguely insulting, since the meanings of the words are always apparent from their contexts. Fresh Dressed goes in one ear and out the other. It is not fresh at all.