For Black men, fashion has been a tool of self-expression — and a way they’ve been judged

By Deepti Hajela

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, the Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley was given the message early on: What one wore as a Black man mattered.

Wesley’s pastor father, who migrated from Louisiana after World War II in search of more opportunities than those readily available to Black people in the Deep South, “always had an impeccable sense of shirt and tie and suit.”

“In order to move in certain spaces where colored people were not allowed to be, you want to be dressed the right way to be able to fit in,” says Wesley, 53, now a senior pastor in Alexandria, Virginia.

But Wesley also got an early warning: What he wore could be used against him. His father forbade baseball caps because some street gang members wore them in certain ways, and his father was concerned authorities would make stereotypical or racist assumptions about his son if