By Alice Gregory/Smithsonian Magazine – SmithsonianMag.com – Photo Rue des Archives/Granger/NYC.

Though the zoot suit would be donned by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, it was “not a costume or uniform from the world of entertainment,” the Chicago big-band trumpeter and clothier Harold Fox once said. “It came right off the street and out of the ghetto.”

Cab Callowway called the Zoot Suit, “The ultimate in clothes.”

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