In 1984, 19-year-old Maurice Malone wanted to make himself a hat he saw in a video but couldn’t find in stores. The only problem: he needed a business license in order to get the necessary leather and suede from a Detroit supplier that only sold wholesale. Such is the origin story for his first company, which led to a trailblazing career in streetwear and denim.
Like fellow streetwear pioneer April Walker, whom he joined in conversation at the 2026 Black Footwear Forum in Detroit in September, Malone’s career in fashion is deeply intertwined with hip-hop. As Walker Wear pieces were embraced by the likes of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, Malone’s legendary fashion-meets-music establishment known as The Hip-Hop Shop was an incubator for Detroit rappers including Eminem.
April Walker and Maurice Malone at the 2026 Black Footwear Forum.
Courtesy of Black Footwear Forum
Malone’s journey into his denim specialty began because he was interested in making what he himself wore as a teenager: jeans. Malone would visit his local library in Oak Park, Mich. to learn to sew, and made use of his mother’s sewing machines. It was his limitations that ultimately helped make his designs unique.
He explained to WWD at the conference, “Because I wasn’t formally taught and I was learning on the fly, I didn’t know how to make a zipper fly, so I made things like pull-up pants with an elastic waistband and denim with leather stripes. So what I made looked different simply because I couldn’t make it the way it should be made.”
Malone became known for making overalls, again because of his lack of zipper expertise. His double-sided, reversible paisley-print overalls became an a famous piece of his early era. Walker said in their conversation on stage, “Your overall jeans, I still would love a pair because they were everything.”
Malone started promoting parties as early as high school, an endeavor that ended up finding synergy with his interest in design; he opened a club called the U.N. in Detroit that functioned as his studio by day and club by night. His parties were an opportunity to feature fashion shows and sell his clothes — but when the police kept shutting down the club, he decided it was time to expand his horizons in New York, where he was exposed to the city’s hip-hop scene.
1980s: Maurice Malone pictured in his own creation, jeans featuring metal plates.
Courtesy of Maurice Malone
Malone moved back to Detroit in 1990, wanting to bring the hip-hop energy of New York back home. The plan was to finance himself through hip-hop parties, where he’d bring in rappers he’d met and sell his T-shirts and jeans. He and a friend started the Rhythm Kitchen in a Chinese restaurant called Stanley’s, and the parties grew bigger and bigger. A retailer he was selling to, Strictly Sportswear, invested him in so he could prove that he could sell 1,000 jeans, which he achieved before production even came in.
Malone eventually opened The Hip-Hop Shop, where Eminem cut his teeth as a young rapper. He explained the dual function of the space: “We moved clothes back every Saturday 5 to 7 and we let kids come in and rap and battle each other. And then we also did nightclubs, hip-hop night at The Shelter every Monday night.”
The hip-hop scenes at these two places are amalgamated in the Detroit-based film “8 Mile,” which draws from real experiences in Eminem’s life. Malone served as a consultant on the film.
Malone explained, “In the movie ‘8 Mile,’ they combined our hip-hop parties at the actual Shelter and they took our Hip-Hop Shop battles and put them in the atmosphere of the nightclub. I worked with the director because I used to record the battles and had footage from the parties. So they used our footage to try to recreate those battle scenes.”
With his career having grown, Malone went back to New York and worked with another partner from 1995-2001, a successful period for the designer in which he delved into different fashion categories including high-end, jeans and sportswear.
Notably, he was nominated by the CFDA for the Perry Ellis Award for menswear in 1997 alongside Sandy Dalal and Marc Jacobs. Walker remarked upon the significance of the recognition: “You were probably the first that I can remember coming from our culture that was nominated.”
Lauryn Hill wearing Maurice Malone “Blue Jeans for Your Ass” logo T-shirt in the 1990s.
Courtesy of Maurice Malone
As a Black designer in the denim and streetwear industry, Malone recalled a lack of representation of urban brands in department stores, saying, “They kept us out of department stores for a long time.”
Before urban brands were embraced by department stores, Malone attended a DNR retailers’ conference in Palm Beach where the president of Macy’s was the featured speaker. With hardly any Black people in the room, he raised his hand to ask a question about representation in retail.
He recalled the moment: “I told him, you guys sell Tommy, you sell Ralph Lauren and they sell. They’re big in the urban community, but you don’t let any urban brands in your stores. And we’ve already proven that we have a market, so I want to know what’s the holdup from letting us in.”
While he was told they “would look into” this matter, he believes his outspokenness ultimately led to being blackballed.
He said, “They start bringing in all the other brands. They start bringing in Fubu, Ekko, Karl Kani. Every brand they brought in, and we were in every city across the nation, number one, two or three top seller. And they just left us out.”
He also remembered the struggle to get his clothes placed in editorial layouts for major magazines. But Malone believes things have come a long way since then in terms of diversity in the industry.
“We had to fight for everything,” he said of the era when he was coming up. “Even with the runway shows. I was the first designer from the hip-hop industry to go high-end, and now hip-hop is high-end. But at the time when I was doing runway shows, people were saying, ‘Fashion trickles down, it doesn’t trickle up.”
Maurice Malone
Courtesy
Feeling disenchanted with the rise of celebrity brands and bored with the streetwear business, he broke off his partnership in the early 2000s and focused on runway collections. In 2012, he started a denim-focused business that is still operating today, Williamsburg Garment Co., which he ran as a one-man company for the first five years.
With his current business, he’s dedicated to educating the next generation of denim designers and wants to bring back American-made denim. He offers the Denim Workshop, a nine-week course educating students on how to make jeans from start to finish, and the free Denim Talk online conversation series featuring guest speakers. Anyone can drop in to learn about the industry.
Maurice Malone and April Walker at the 2026 Black Footwear Forum.
Courtesy of Black Footwear Forum
When Walker and Malone began their conversation onstage, Walker expressed how it would’ve been nice to have a space like the Black Footwear Forum available to them when they were starting out. The talk concluded with Malone receiving his flowers, quite literally via a bouquet and Walker passing on her Trailblazer Award to Malone.
