How women broke barriers in the hip-hop fashion industry

Designer April Walker said that when she created her menswear line Walker Wear in 1988, she decided not to shout from the rooftops that her streetwear line was run by a woman, out of concern that she’d be written off.

Walker went to her father, who worked in the music industry, to ask his advice. “I remember talking to him,” Walker said in an interview for “50 Years Fly: The Rise, Fall and Revolution of Hip-Hop Fashion,” a new documentary by NBC News, “and asking him, ‘I wanna do this line. I wanna call it Walker Wear. Do you think people should know that there’s a woman behind it?’ Because I was kind of skeptical that if they knew it was menswear, they might be like, ‘I’m not buying clothes from a woman. What does she know about making clothes for men?’ And he just posed the question. He said, ‘If you have to ask the question, you’ve already answered it.’”