‘Fresh Faced’ Director Sacha Jenkins on Kanye West, Channing Tatum and Hip-Hop in Fashion

“I remembered all the money that was generated by those brands at their height and how it’s now gone. I felt it was important for people to understand the power of the dollar and who generated it,” Jenkins says. Among several amusing sightings in the archival footage is a then-unknown Channing Tatum walking in a Sean John runway show.

Jenkins was a music editor at Vibe in the early Aughts during the height of what became known as urban fashion — lines created by music moguls Russell Simmons, Jay Z and Damon Dash.

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“I’m not a fashion person. I’m more interested in the conditions that created the fashion, how it was a reaction to what was happening and how these artists created their own vocabulary based on how they wore things. I felt that [a documentary] would be a great backdoor way of telling the history of hip-hop through the clothes,” says Jenkins, who interviewed designers ranging from Karl Kani to Riccardo Tisci as well as a slew of rappers including Williams, West, Sean “Diddy” Combs and Nas, who was a producer on the film.

In the Eighties, the term “fresh” came to mean crisp, new-in-the-box fashion, and a dapper appearance cultivated. Says West in the film, “Being fresh is more important than having money. The entire time I was growing up I only wanted money so I could be fresh.”

June 16, 2024

“Hip-hop was just something that we did, no one was thinking money,” says Jenkins, 43, a New York City native who published his first zine — about graffiti — at 17, followed by a hip-hop newspaper called Beat Down, and a critically recognized magazine called Ego Trip.

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As Jenkins put it, “It’s not necessarily about the brands per se. It’s about the attitude of hip-hop applied to these things and how it took on a certain cache.”