Dropping today during a cocktail party at the Gucci Garden venue in Florence, Dapper Dan himself will be on hand to sign copies. The book is shot by Ari Marcopoulos, the photographer who’s captured everyone from New York royalty, from Jay-Z and the Beastie Boys, to daredevils, like the train-hopping skaters of the early ‘90s.
Here, in a maroon-and-gold tome, Marcopoulous’ focus is Dapper Dan, both a New York king and a daredevil who famously repurposed luxury logos like Gucci and Louis Vuitton into completely hot-gold outlaw designs that, as GQ described, “defined the high-flying look of Harlem’s cocaine ‘80s.”
In the book, Marcopoulous takes a journey through Harlem, offering a look inside Dapper Dan’s home and his atelier, which was litigated until it was forced to close in 1992 butt brought back with some help from Gucci in 2017. It also, as WWD reports, features portraits of Dan’s circle of friends, including poet Cleo Wade, chef Marcus Samuelsson, and artist Trevor Andrew.
Only 500 copies of Dapper Dan’s Harlem will be available at the Gucci Garden and Gucci Wooster Bookstore in New York City. And though it retails for a cool $200, for a coffee-table book both sleekly adult and deeply enlightening, it’s more than worth it.