zoot suit

zoot suit

A type of suit, popular among men in the 1930s and '40s, consisting of a long, broad jacket and wide-legged pants worn high on the waist, typically accompanied by a fedora or pork pie hat of a matching color. My friends and I decided to wear zoot suits to prom so we would stand out from everyone wearing normal tuxedoes. It's odd seeing pictures of my granddad tearing up the dance floor in his zoot suit as a young man.
See also: suit, zoot
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

zoot suit

A man's ensemble for hipsters and other cool dudes. Popular during the 1930s and '40s, a zoot suit featured a long coat with wide lapels and padded shoulders and matching high-waisted, ballooning pants. Fancy shoes and a felt fedora hat completed the hipster “look.” “Zoot” was apparently a variation of the word “suit.”
See also: suit, zoot
Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price
See also:
  • black tie
  • ladies and gentlemen
  • loop-legged
  • legged
  • contest
  • be busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest
  • all fours
  • powder room
  • be dead from the waist down
  • loose change
References in periodicals archive
HUERTA: In the early years, the Teatro Campesino exposed and explored farmworkers' reality, as opposed to the experiences of urban Chicanas and Chicanos, as Zoot Suit did.
Despite this oversight, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits highlights how the war industries did more than simply make planes, tanks, and bombs, but also reshaped American culture and sub-cultures during the war years.
"Zoot Suit Riot" will be the jam-packed second half of the performance, with 13 Daddies' songs on the playlist.
Honing in on one corner of this "hyphen nation" and one moment in its history, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits explores the myriad ways in which World War II transformed "women of Mexican descent" in Los Angeles into Mexican Americans.
Zoot Suit is a must read for anyone interested in the convergence point of American personal identity, popular culture, race relations, and politics.
Chapter one reviews the role of the Pachuca women in several major events in Latino culture--the Zoot Suit Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon incident, both in the 1940s, and both watershed moments in Mexican-American history.
Second, Alvarez convincingly connects the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles with similarly violent outbreaks in cities across the U.S.
From "all gussied up" to "zoot suit", each entry offers plain, no-nonsense information about the history and usage of each phrase (or the best known theories of the phrase's origin).
The zoot suit, generating the connotations of slang, swing, leisure, dysfunction, and urbanism because of its visibility in night clubs, and through jazz musicians, and riots, also constituted, like gangster movies, bracero youths' response to white paranoia and white projection of bracero youths as deviants.
We recognize that today's LAPD is a far cry from the one that turned its ''Red Squad'' against liberals in the early decades of the 20th century, that allowed soldiers to beat young Latino men in the 1940s during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, that spied on political opponents through the 1960s and 1970s -- including such fringe figures as the mayor.
Classic Theatre, in the mayhem of the Zoot Suit riots, Romeo is once again falling for Juliet: two star-crossed Los Angeles youths worried about Mexican immigration.
Beatings, whippings, canings, lynchings, labor riots at River Rouge, race riots in Tulsa, zoot suit riots in East L.A--the soundtrack of the American movie isn't exactly played on a harp.
On June 9 and 10, 1943, in the midst of the Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles newspapers announced the arrest of a "pachuco woman." According to the press, twenty-two-year-old Amelia Venegas, mother of a toddler and wife of a sailor, had incited violence by urging a gang of pachucos to attack sheriff's deputies in her East Los Angeles neighborhood.
Terms such as sad sack, jitterbug, gizmo (Dad was in the Navy), Eisenhower jacket and zoot suit, and bobbysoxer are familiar to me, even though I was born in the 1950s.