Entry · catalog no. 1035
zoot suit
/ /
noun · Harlem · nationwide ·
✓ Verified
1.
A men's suit built for presence: wide padded shoulders, a long draped jacket, and high-waisted trousers billowing at the knee and tapered tight at the ankle. Worn as pride made visible in a world that offered Black and Brown men little of it.
“He saved for months for a zoot suit sharp enough to stop the room.”
Origin & Attribution
Took shape in Black jazz communities in the late 1930s and spread through young Black and Chicano men in the early 1940s. Cab Calloway wore one on screen in Stormy Weather (1943); Malcolm X recalls buying his first in his autobiography. Wartime resentment of the look sparked the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Harlem · nationwide ·
Spoken by
$ZOOTSUThe Record · cultural traction
▲ 26 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Stormy Weather — film · 1943
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Autobiography of Malcolm X — memoir · 1965
submitted
See also