Editor’s Note: Fit Check is a series about style and personal expression in the Bay Area. See other installments here.
Noah David Coogler — stage name OG Dayv — stands outside his grandmother’s house in February as thick, gray clouds condense all over Oakland. In a knit beanie and a quilted jacket, Coogler looks right at home beneath an overcast sky.
Even when he’s on stage performing tracks like “Limoncello” from the Wakanda Forever soundtrack, Coogler keeps it comfy in a bucket hat, Dickies and a roomy trench coat that lightly billows as he moves.
“I would describe my sense of style as the three Cs: comfy, cozy and cool,” says Coogler, who was born in Oakland and now lives in Richmond.
But while the Bay is known for its laid-back clothing, Coogler says we don’t give enough credit where credit is due — and he doesn’t mean to Patagonia.
For Coogler, cozy and cool is Mac Dre on the cover of his 1991 EP California Livin’: posted up on a cushy, white couch in jeans and an oversized white baseball tee, leaning back on his elbow.
“It just screams Bay Area,” Coogler says.
And whether Coogler is chilling at home playing Pokémon Platinum on his Nintendo DS or heading out to a music video shoot, there are two cultural touchstones that guide his wardrobe: hip-hop and the Black Panthers.
“From what I’ve observed in my 33 years, hip-hop is the most influential thing on the planet,” Coogler says.
That includes its influence on what people wear. Cool, comfy Bay Area style is Keak Da Sneak wearing oversized T-shirts and jeans in the ’90s. It’s LaRussell sporting Crocs in 2024. And it’s rooted in a fusion of hip-hop and skater culture that began in the mid-’90s.
Coogler points to the mid-aughts Bay Area rap group The Pack, who came on the scene just as he was figuring out his sense of style, as the embodiment of that fusion.
“The Pack — they bridged the gap between rap culture and skate culture,” he says. “They came out of Berkeley and they were baggy: big hoodies, big jeans and the Vans, which was such a crazy polarizing look during a time when everyone was wearing Jordans.”
At Coogler’s grandmother’s house, the only decor on the porch is a worn-out “Welcome to Wakanda” doormat — an ode to Coogler’s older brother, co-writer and director of the Black Panther movies, Ryan Coogler.
But that doormat doesn’t mark the only noteworthy entryway in the neighborhood. Just a few blocks away is the original headquarters of the Black Panther Party on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, another part of Coogler’s family history.
Long before the late Chadwick Boseman took up the mantle of T’Challa, a man named Clarence Thomas (not the Supreme Court Justice) was a student at San Francisco State University in the 1960s. Thomas participated in a wave of student protests organized by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front that led to the creation of the school’s ethnic studies department (the country’s first). He’s also Coogler’s uncle and style icon.
“The Panthers never looked disheveled, rusty or dusty — it’s casual clothing, but it’s neat,” Coogler said. “And that’s what I always noticed about my uncle — he was always put together.”
Uncle Clarence wore hardy, wide-legged work pants and a dark blue, wool coat that kept him warm while he worked at the Port of Oakland as a longshoreman, Coogler remembers. And when his uncle wasn’t working — like when he took a young Coogler to a Black history exhibit in Oakland — he carried himself with that same composed ease.
“Even when he wore jeans they would be crisp,” Coogler remembers. “Always had a nice leather belt, nice shirt, really nice jacket and maybe a turtleneck.”
There was a throughline between the practical longshoreman workwear and the semi-professional, Ivy-leaning sensibility of the Black Panthers that cohered in Uncle Clarence’s style. And it resonated with Coogler.
On stage, Coogler’s Dickies, his roomy houndstooth jacket and his collared dress shirt echo all those entwined memories and local family histories, he says.
When Coogler was just a few years old, his parents couldn’t afford to live in Oakland anymore, despite their strong community ties. Like many other Black families, they were forced to move elsewhere — in the Coogler family’s case, to Richmond.
“Oh man, so when you walk through Oakland now, when you walk through Berkeley now, you can feel the culture shift,” he says. “I remember growing up in the Bay in the ’90s and the early 2000s — I remember it was minorities everywhere, not just Black people, and what happens is we get priced out.”
Coogler sees the corporate techy style that’s overtaken the Bay as part and parcel of that precipitous gentrification, which has decreased Black homeownership in Oakland enormously.
“If you’re a real Bay head, you know that Bay Area people don’t rock Patagonia like that — new Bay Area people do,” he says.
Gorp-y outerwear and soft basics are still very much a part of the Bay’s vernacular. But the regional brand staples for Coogler are like him — they came up in the Bay.
“We wore North Face, but the reason we wore North Face is because we got a North Face dealer in Berkeley,” he explains. “Gap hoodies — big Bay Area thing.”
Coogler wants to move back to Oakland one day, but he recognizes how it’s changed; it’s apparent in how people dress.
“When you remove the people that make a place special, you lose the culture,” he says, “you lose the feel, you lose the zest, the flavor.”
