Interview: Elena Romero, Author of “Free Stylin’: How Hip Hop Changed The Fashion Industry” on The NY Hip Hop Report

Journalist and educator Elena Romero has covered the fashion industry since the 1990s, with particular focus on “hip hop fashion,” witnessing and studying its growth from the streets to designer workshops to the boardrooms. Ms. Romero has recently published Free Stylin’: How Hip Hop Changed the Fashion Industry, a definitive guide to the business pf hip hop fashion, in an attempt to place what was once considered “the stepchild of the fashion industry” into its proper “historical context.”

Ms. Romero currently teaches fashion journalism and advertising and promotion at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) as well as media courses at The City College of New York Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education. She organizes the yearly “Is Hip Hop History? Conference” and a regular lecture series, “Reading Hip Hop: Off The Records, In The Books”.

Free Stylin’ is available at major book retailers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Ms. Romero will be conducting a book reading and reception on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 at Harlem Haberdashery, 245 Lenox Ave. (between 122nd & 123rd St.) in Harlem.

Below is my interview with Elena Romero, about her new book and the hip hop fashion industry, as it aired on The NY Hip Hop Report, Sunday, September 9, 2012.

[Interview begins at 22:22]