Since the days when Dapper Dan was cooking up flamboyant luxury knockoffs out of a Harlem storefront, hip-hop had its sights set on infiltration, and it’s finally making headway as an influence on the runway. But the silk ceiling was real, and so hip-hop made do, writing its own fashion codes, doing what it could with what was around.

Long before I started writing the Critical Shopper column for The New York Times — five years and counting, now — I was a critical shopper on the outer edge of Brooklyn, sniffing around Kings Plaza for new Girbauds, shopping for Carhartt on Avenue U. Before there were stores that specifically catered to hip-hop taste, you pieced together your outfit as best you could. Some days in the 11th grade, I’m sure I wore a motorcycle jacket with saggy jeans and Jordan Vs — I looked ridiculous, I imagine, but 16-year-old me would have been glad to know that a couple of decades later, that would turn out to be a dominant hip-hop look for a few months.

Back then, hip-hop style was an imperfect art, and looking right took work. Eventually, though, in the early- and mid-1990s, rappers started colonizing mainstream brands — Raekwon wore the brashest Polo, Grand Puba made Tommy Hilfiger swing. That was the first era where men’s clothing designers began to respect the hip-hop dollar. On lucky days, I’d come into Manhattan and get lost in the Polo or Hilfiger section of Bloomingdale’s, wondering how loudly I could let a logo scream off my body.

Very loudly, as it happened, and hugely, too. As men’s high fashion was becoming emaciated, hip-hop was asserting its own silhouette — baggy, slouchy, indifferent, with a tenuous relationship between the clothes and the body hidden beneath. (I’m bigger now than I was in high school, but my old Carhartt jacket is still two to three sizes too large.) What may have begun as a reflection of mainstream white stiffness ended up becoming a stand-alone aesthetic.

No one told us what we were doing was fashion, and for the most part, we didn’t care, content to be on the outside and in control.