For Black men, fashion has been a tool of self-expression — and a way they’ve been judged

By DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Growing up on the south side of Chicago, the Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley was given the message early on: What one wore as a Black man mattered.

Wesley’s pastor father, who migrated from Louisiana after World War II in search of more opportunmetities than those readily available to Black people in the Deep South, “always had an impeccable sense of shirt and tie and suit.”

“In order to move in certain spaces where colored people were not allowed to be...