Buying In - (Page 14) 14 rob walker ished. Even so, as anyone with passing familiarity with contemporary hip-hop knows, it’s a culture that remains positively obsessed with authenticity—almost every topselling rapper makes his or her own street cred (maybe a past dealing drugs, maybe direct experience with violence, maybe just an autobiography tied up in big-city poverty) a primary lyrical subject. In the early 2000s, as hip-hop evolved into an aesthetic available in suburban department stores under the rubric of “urban” apparel, connections to the authentic street remained important. Urban apparel redefined the young men’s clothing business, and most of the successful brands had some direct link to hiphop—Rocawear through Jay-Z and Damon Dash; Sean John through P. Diddy; Phat Fashions through Russell Simmons. Ecko was as big as, or bigger than, any of the hip-hop-associated brands just mentioned. Many people would likely have recognized that rhino symbol on Ecko’s freestanding building at Magic, but few would have been able to tell you much about the man behind it: a white, baby-faced thirty-three-year-old from the Jersey suburbs. Marc Milecofsky grew up in Lakewood, about an hour and a half south of Manhattan, and spent more time in malls than in the streets. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a real estate agent. He had two sisters, one of whom was his twin, Marci. (The name Ecko is derived from a family story: When his mother was pregnant with Marci, the doctor informed her of an “echo,” which turned out to be Marc.) In about the fifth grade, he started to think about the relationship between style and social groups. He also figured out that not every place was as ethnically and culturally diverse as Lakewood’s public schools: At extended family gettogethers, it was a source of amusement that young Marc was into this exotic thing called break dancing. Not that he could do
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